Tecoris

I was in the sandwich shop today buying a sandwich, and I was
treated so badly I determined not to ever return to that particular
store.  While that may not be remarkable in itself, it made me think,
“How many of my customers (or ex-customers, perhaps, by now) feel that
way?  I determined to go straight back to the office and educate myself.

I called a customer who had done business with us for a long time,
but whose orders had started to dwindle.  “Hey, Bob, Allan here.  How’s
it going?”  The response was much more curt than I expected.  “Fine,”
said with some finality.  “Well, the reason I called was I had a bad
customer service experience at lunch today, and thought I’d call some
of my best customers to see how their experience has been dealing with
me.”

At that point, I got an earful.  Not only had his experience with my
company not been a happy one, there had been some sort of problem
almost every time he dealt with us.  I was shocked and appalled.  I
didn’t know what to say.  I begged his forgiveness, made several
promises and hung up with some hope of resurrecting our relationship. 
Several more calls revealed other problems (though none quite as big.)

I realized that somebody in my organization didn’t see things and
feel about things the way I did (big surprise.)  What was a surprise,
however, was how big a problem I had without even knowing.  I thought
we were doing great.  We had company meetings on the importance of
customer service, and the word inside our company was that we were
doing great.  I hadn’t gotten any contrary word from outside our
company, so I thought everything was fine.  Needless to say, we made
some radical changes (in personnel, as well as policy) and started to
move forward.

It comes down to this:  I could have lost everything, all for the
lack of caring on the part of some $5 per hour person.  I had let
myself become complacent.  In the early days, I dealt directly with our
customers every day, but as we grew, I was distracted by other — “more
important” — things.  My proposal to you is, there is nothing more
important to your business than your customers.  If you haven’t talked
to your customers in the last month, you’re out of touch.

What you don’t know about customer service can hurt you.

That’s a loaded question. We all know who we “trust,” but what I’m
asking here is who do you go to when you need information about
something that’s happening (or not happening) in your business? You
know as well as I do that if you ask three mid-level managers what’s
happening, you’ll get three different answers. It’s not only
frustrating, it can be downright life-threatening to your business to
get your information from the wrong source.

I worked with one CFO who had the best business judgment of any
financial person I’ve ever worked with. When he looked at something and
gave his opinion of what happened, he was always right. He had a very
keen analytical mind. He had an extraordinary ability to sift through
the facts, throw out the stuff that wasn’t relevant, and come to a
correct conclusion.

On the other hand, I’ve worked with people who couldn’t (for the
life of them) separate the important things from the unimportant. Yes,
the data they gathered was true and factual, it’s just that much of it
wasn’t relevant to the situation. When those true (but not relevant)
things got factored into the situation, they often had a skewed view of
the situation.

So it comes down to this. When you get wind of something going on in
your business do you say, “I’d better get down there and see what in
the world’s going on.” Or do you say, “I’d better send Sue down there
to see what’s going on.” If you send Sue is that the same as going
yourself? Or in other words, is she going to bring you a correct
assessment of the situation? One that will arrive at the same
conclusions you would have arrived at yourself?

That’s what the title of this post is asking. Who can you really
trust? What are you doing to bring people along (meaning what are you
doing to teach them how to evaluate a situation?) By taking your
managers aside, listening to how they arrived at their conclusions
you’ll be able to better understand their thought processes. (NOTE:
Some people you will never understand. Don’t spend a lot of time with
them. They’ll never get it.)

Once you understand how an employee arrived at a conclusion, you can
begin to teach where the logic broke down and how you arrived at your
conclusion. After a few situations (and a few teaching opportunities)
you should start to see your colleague begin to exercise better
judgment.

The bottom line is, if you don’t have someone you can trust, you
have to do everything yourself. That’s maybe okay when your business is
small, but at some point you’ll no longer be able to get your arms
around everything. At that point your business will begin to struggle.
It happens in all entrepreneurial businesses.

Start now to find out whom you can trust. And begin to train others.
The more people assess things the way you do, the more they will be
able to respond like you would (presumably yielding a better result.)
Being CEO means being a teacher. Even good people will need to be
brought up to speed on “your way” of doing things. That’s the
investment you make in them. If you have done everything right in
surrounding yourself with good people, that investment will pay big
dividends.