Forbes.com

Recovering the Voices of the Customer and the Front Line

Successful entrepreneurs tend to be obsessed with customers’ unmet needs.

By James Allen

Published on December 21, 2015
min read


This article originally appeared on Forbes.com. Successful entrepreneurs tend to be obsessed with customers’ unmet needs. They understand how critical front-line employees are to serving those needs. Yet as companies grow, paradoxically, founders may find that the voices of the customer and the front line tend to fade. The administrative demands of a growing business begin to pull founders away from the front line. They may try to deal with this by demanding reports on every detail of how the front line is performing. Yet that impulse simply turns more of the organization’s focus inward, absorbing huge amounts of time. There’s a related trap for high-growth businesses, the law of averages, where senior leaders seek a common language across their proliferating products and regions. They start to talk about serving the “average customer,” rather than delighting the most important ones. This leads to a stale, mediocre customer experience. The best founders and CEOs get out from behind their desks and go see for themselves what’s happening in their market. The founder of one U.K. retail chain says he constantly visits the shops to look for ideas and listen to the people who serve customers every day—so he can see the business as his customers see it. Growth can even pull front-line employees away from their customers. One rental car company in Latin America needed lots of training and coordination meetings to cope with its rapid growth. But that meant that a local site manager wasn’t available when a corporate customer called with an urgent request to adjust an existing order for a lot of cars later that day. After leaving two messages, the customer called the CEO to leave an angry message—and was surprised when he answered the phone. The CEO quickly confirmed the order for the customer, who thanked him but remarked that it was odd that it was easier to reach the CEO than local management. “I agreed,” the CEO told me. “I couldn’t believe someone would put internal meetings ahead of the customer. But the more I probed, the more I realized we were inadvertently sending signals that internal meetings were more important. We were telling managers to make sure their people came to training programs regardless of how busy they were.” As a result, this company’s code of ethics guide now contains a new nonnegotiable requirement: “Responding to our clients takes priority over meetings, events, training or any other commitment.” Like the rental car CEO, entrepreneurs should look for opportunities to send a message to the entire company about what matters most to the business. James Allen is co-leader of the global strategy practice at Bain & Company and co-author of the upcoming book “The Founder’s Mentality.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Successful entrepreneurs tend to be obsessed with customers’ unmet needs. They understand how critical front-line employees are to serving those needs. Yet as companies grow, paradoxically, founders may find that the voices of the customer and the front line tend to fade.

The administrative demands of a growing business begin to pull founders away from the front line. They may try to deal with this by demanding reports on every detail of how the front line is performing. Yet that impulse simply turns more of the organization’s focus inward, absorbing huge amounts of time. There’s a related trap for high-growth businesses, the law of averages, where senior leaders seek a common language across their proliferating products and regions. They start to talk about serving the “average customer,” rather than delighting the most important ones. This leads to a stale, mediocre customer experience.

The best founders and CEOs get out from behind their desks and go see for themselves what’s happening in their market. The founder of one U.K. retail chain says he constantly visits the shops to look for ideas and listen to the people who serve customers every day—so he can see the business as his customers see it.

Growth can even pull front-line employees away from their customers. One rental car company in Latin America needed lots of training and coordination meetings to cope with its rapid growth. But that meant that a local site manager wasn’t available when a corporate customer called with an urgent request to adjust an existing order for a lot of cars later that day. After leaving two messages, the customer called the CEO to leave an angry message—and was surprised when he answered the phone. The CEO quickly confirmed the order for the customer, who thanked him but remarked that it was odd that it was easier to reach the CEO than local management.

“I agreed,” the CEO told me. “I couldn’t believe someone would put internal meetings ahead of the customer. But the more I probed, the more I realized we were inadvertently sending signals that internal meetings were more important. We were telling managers to make sure their people came to training programs regardless of how busy they were.”

As a result, this company’s code of ethics guide now contains a new nonnegotiable requirement: “Responding to our clients takes priority over meetings, events, training or any other commitment.” Like the rental car CEO, entrepreneurs should look for opportunities to send a message to the entire company about what matters most to the business.

James Allen is co-leader of the global strategy practice at Bain & Company and co-author of the upcoming book “The Founder’s Mentality.”