Quotes about Customers

The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that's how long it's going to take, guys.

If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful.

Don't let the "enemy" rule your life. Try your damnedest to follow the exact advice of Mr McCue...: "Literally don't think about them."

Easier said than done, no doubt, but awareness is a start. That is, direct conversations away from "What is Microsoft doing?" ("What is the accountancy across the road doing?") And focus instead on, What new and cool things are we doing for our customers?

I think there's a need for somewhat of a mindset change. We need to have a consistent external focus. We've always had the research labs. We've always had the resources to be innovative, and we've been innovative in a number of businesses. But, in any big company, you have to constantly push people to look at markets and customers, rather than look internally at themselves.

An attitude that leaders serve customers first is especially vital to sustaining success. Employees are only empowered by serving customers. They’re not motivated by getting the stock price up, cutting the budget, or increasing the earnings. They don’t see tangible rewards from succeeding by those metrics, even if you make them shareholders. They get turned on about customers. In a Starbucks store, the barista gets excited about creating an environment that’s fun for the customer. I was at Starbucks earlier this morning and saw a barista greet a customer by saying, “Oh, Rick, nice to see you. Do you want the Rick special?” Rick comes there every morning because he has a relationship with that Starbucks employee.

Many companies operate from more of a command-and-control environment — they decide what's going to happen at headquarters and have the organization execute. That doesn't work here because it's the community of users who really have control.

So we enable, not direct. We think of our customers as people, not wallets. And that has implications for how we run the company. We partner with our customers and let them take the company where they think it's best utilized.

The fact that used cars is our largest category is a good example. We would not have sat in a conference room and said, "Hey, how about used cars?" So what can be learned that is extensible to other companies is [to ask] what are your customers doing with your products that maybe you didn't anticipate that they would do? How do you think of your customers as your research and development lab, as opposed to having an R&D lab at headquarters?

If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better—period!

Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

I think technology advanced faster than anticipated. In that whirlwind, a lot of companies didn't survive. The reason we have done well is because, even in that whirlwind, we kept heads-down focused on the customers. All the metrics that we can track about customers have improved every year.

I think one of the things that was useful to me was not really college, but just reading books and studying how major consumer innovations took place. If you look back at the history of the telephone a century earlier, it took decades before it was common. Initially people said, "Why would I ever need a phone? If I want to talk to somebody I'll just go next door and talk to them." You couldn't imagine that people would have phones. So eventually, after many years, maybe there was a phone in the bar in town. If you had to make a call to somebody, you'd go to that one phone and enter a party line, a shared line, and so forth. Eventually, it got to the point where people did say, "You know, you do need a phone in your home!" By the time I was growing up everybody had a phone in their home. Today they have multiple phones in their homes and cell phones and computer access with instant messaging.

You can't delegate growth or customer satisfaction. I'm spending four or five days a month with customers. Twice every month, I do town-hall meetings with several hundred customers to share ideas on GE's direction and listen to their thoughts on what we can do better. And we're doing what I call dreaming sessions with key customer groups, trying to think about where our business and their business will be in 5 or 10 years. I'm probably spending 30% of the time on people, teaching and coaching. I'm using 10% of my time on governance, working with the board, meeting with investors. The rest would be time spent on the plumbing of the company, working on operating reviews and strategy sessions.

We started our company in 2002 when nothing was getting funded anywhere and everyone was still licking their wounds from the big bubble bang. Nobody cared about us except us. We were in Vancouver fer crissakes. But we were able to focus on finding and connecting with the people who mattered most: the customers, the users, the community. You get more done when no one's looking over your shoulder.

Growth isn't central at all, because I'm trying to run this company as if it's going to be here a hundred years from now. And if you take where we are today and add 15% growth, like public companies need to have for their stock to stay up in value, I'd be a multi-trillion-dollar company in 40 years. Which is impossible, of course.

So all of these companies that are going for the big growth, if it continues for any length of time, will outlast their resources and outlast their customers and go belly-up. And that's why these huge companies have massive layoffs all the time.

Since I'm trying to run this company like it's going to be around a hundred years from now, we have to limit our growth and keep it to what we call "natural growth." In other words, I don't advertise on billboards in inner cities so that kids buy our black down jackets instead of The North Face's. In fact, we hardly advertise at all.

We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.

If you were charged with fixing the U.S. auto industry, how would you do it?

The guys who run the auto companies are out of touch with their customers and their employees. They ride to work in their limousines. They go up in their elevators and lock themselves in their offices. They don't walk out into the plants. They wouldn't even drive in the neighborhoods where their employees live. They give themselves big bonuses when the company isn't making any money. I'd make them get involved with the people who are building the cars. They've got to become real people.

You can't delegate growth or customer satisfaction. I'm spending four or five days a month with customers. Twice every month, I do town-hall meetings with several hundred customers to share ideas on GE's direction and listen to their thoughts on what we can do better. And we're doing what I call dreaming sessions with key customer groups, trying to think about where our business and their business will be in 5 or 10 years. I'm probably spending 30% of the time on people, teaching and coaching. I'm using 10% of my time on governance, working with the board, meeting with investors. The rest would be time spent on the plumbing of the company, working on operating reviews and strategy sessions.

Much literature has been written on branding. 

But what is a brand?  Can you define it in just 6 words?

No, it is not Nike’s “swoop.”  It is not McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” jingle.  It is not Accenture’s Tiger Woods ads.  It is not the design of my website or my “Unconventional Thinking” tag line.

Erik Hansen, Tom Peters’ brand manager (and a good friend of mine), said it quite eloquently.  A brand is… “what your customers say it is.” 

What is great about this definition is that it gives you direct access to changing your brand.  To change your brand you must change your customers’ perceptions and experiences.  No logo or advertising campaign has ever done this.

The bottom line is it is really important to be involved with your salespeople. CEO Anne Mulcahy has said she will go anywhere anytime to save a Xerox customer. That's the kind of engagement you have to have to be successful.

We're living in a world now where consumers are bombarded with thousands of commercial messages - they're everywhere you look. Unless you can cut through that and engage someone, I think you are lost. Consumers are now clearly in control. They control what they hear and see, when, and where. You have to find ways to allow them to actively engage with you, or the money you spend is wasted.

CEO Hal Rosenbluth chronicled the incredible success of his travel-services firm, Rosenbluth Internationl, in...

The Customer Comes Second.

Love that title!

Who comes first? Don't be silly, says King Hal; it's employees. That is -- and this dear Watson, is elementary -- if you genuinely want to put customers first, you must put employees more first.

Face it. The customer service of our fathers’ days, like my father’s little full-service station, is long gone and it’s not coming back.  Customer service should now be thought of as the customer experience department, and its mandate should be to purposefully and tenaciously help the organization design the best darn customer experience possible.  Customer service is, in fact, dead.  Long live the customer experience!

I feel constantly the tension of the quarterly cycles, the drive to produce shareowner value at the cost sometimes of customer value and employee value. [But] if you take equal care of the employees, they will take equal care of the customers and then we will get an equal or better opportunity for our shareowners.

Many companies operate from more of a command-and-control environment — they decide what's going to happen at headquarters and have the organization execute. That doesn't work here because it's the community of users who really have control.

So we enable, not direct. We think of our customers as people, not wallets. And that has implications for how we run the company. We partner with our customers and let them take the company where they think it's best utilized.

But we have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value by making shareholder value the primary purpose of our business. In my marriage, my wife's happiness is an end in itself, not merely a means to my own happiness; love leads me to put my wife's happiness first, but in doing so I also make myself happier. Similarly, the most successful businesses put the customer first, ahead of the investors. In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, customer happiness is an end in itself, and will be pursued with greater interest, passion, and empathy than the profit-centered business is capable of.

The more successful you and your organization become, the more humble and devoted to your customers you need to be.

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.