Who Pays Your Salary?

Looking at the current low standard of customer experience in Saudi Arabia and in many places around the world, I’ve identified one of the major contributors to this low standard which comes in the form of a very powerful false paradigm of thought. A contributor that no one seems to be talking about. For the sake of simplicity, my focus here is the private sector.

Please answer this next question before reading on. Who pays your salary?  

I surveyed front line and support function employees at all levels of numerous organizations from various industries and sectors, asking them that very same question. Almost always the answer revolved around payroll, HR, finance, management or the boss. It’s highly likely that you answered the same. These answers seem to be universal whether you ask that question of front-line or back office employees at the top or bottom of the pyramid and everyone in between. The universality of this core belief constitutes a paradigm. And in this case, it’s a false paradigm that’s prevalent not only in Saudi Arabia but also around the world.

It’s this false paradigm that pushes employees to prioritize pleasing their bosses as oppose to pleasing their customers. It’s this false paradigm that allows management teams and decision makers to create non-customer centric cultures and punitive policies and effortful experiences for their customers with little to no respect for the customers time, effort and value. It’s all too common for front-line employees to simply not care about customers, be disengaged, robotic, rude or even mock customers behind their backs.

So, here is my take on the question of who pays your salary. The simple answer, you guessed it by now, it’s the customer. Finance and payroll simply reallocate and redistribute resources. In this case, reallocation and redistribution of revenue to employees. This can only happen if the customer pays. I call this the true paradigm.

Now imagine, if you would, a different reality where the core belief is “The customer pays my salary” as opposed to “the employer pays my salary”. A belief shared by every employee at all levels of the organization. A core belief that the very livelihood, the very means by which they survive and thrive all comes directly from the customer. If this was the prevalent core belief, would any employee at any level in any business knowingly do anything that even hints at bad experience for their customers? I think not.

Unfortunately, most customers today don’t understand the power they hold. If they did, they wouldn’t accept the current standard of customer experience. They would demand much more. And if their demands aren’t met, they’d go elsewhere, which means that the business they left eventually shuts down.

 How can we get employees and their organizations to adopt this true paradigm as a core belief? Shifting a paradigm for an entire marketplace is no easy task. A catalyst is needed for such a transformation. Usually, a catalyst can come in the form of an economic crisis, some innovation, external regulations, new technology or a new competitor that could motivate companies to go through a full customer experience transformation program with all the initiatives it may entail to completely alter its mindset and culture to one where customer centricity becomes its main competitive advantage. Yes, this would help. However, the standard of customer experience in the marketplace at the moment is at such a low that what’s needed now is not action on an individual company level, but rather a full-on shift in marketplace standards of customer experience. I believe that a ‘customer’s behavior’ is the most powerful catalyst for transformation in this specific case that would have the highest desired natural impact on marketplace dynamics. By that I mean the collective actions of each customer every time they go through a bad experience. When these customer actions that are in response to a bad customer experience become habits and habits become the new customer personality when, only then can a seismic shift in quality standards truly take place in the marketplace as a whole. The new quality standard would no longer be optional. Adapt to the customers new personality or disappear.

 I’ll write in detail about these simple yet seminal actions a customer can take every time they have a bad customer experience in my next article titled “The superpower a customer has”. Can you guess what these actions are? Stay tuned.

Allow me to conclude by invoking the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us; we are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work, he is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business, he is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”