Customer Experience Over Industry Norms

"‘To a Louse’, in which he wrote, ‘O would some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us’. Simply stated this does of course mean, ‘If only we had the power to see ourselves in the same way that others see us.’ Of all the mantras one might adopt in life, this is surely one of the better ones and for anyone in a leadership role it should be an essential part of the checks and balances that are built into a company’s standard operating procedures. I suppose the corporate version of Burns’ famous line would read something like, ‘Always try to look at what we are doing from the customer’s perspective.’"

"I have always found it to be one of the more intriguing idiosyncrasies of the human condition that a problem that is handled quickly and effectively will almost always serve to generate more long-term customer loyalty than when the original service was delivered satisfactorily."

"I have always found that having senior people who demonstrably care enough to pay attention to customer-focused nitty-gritty details – as opposed to just the stock price – serves to encourage everyone in the organisation to get into the habit of seeing what you look like from the outside in. A domino benefit is that middle managers don’t want a senior officer to be the first to tell them how their part of the operation looks from the other side of the fence, especially if they’ve never troubled to set foot over there themselves!"

"Michael O’Leary, CEO of the Irish airline Ryanair, once described his ideal customer as ‘someone with a pulse and a credit card’ and in the same ‘Lunch with the Financial Times’ interview referred to the British Airports Authority as the ‘Evil Empire’ and the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority as a bunch of ‘cretins and twerps’. While nobody can question Ryanair’s incredible financial success (last time I checked the low-cost carrier had built a market cap of over $13 billion), being voted Europe’s ‘least liked’ airline by TripAdvisor subscribers is something that would not sit well with me no matter how good the bottom line looks."