The Customer is the Boss

Written By Ted Grigg

Do companies know who their customers are? Do they know who their customers are not?

In her recent book entitled The Definitive Drucker, the author Elizabeth Edersheim says that Peter Drucker, the grandfather of marketing, believed that beyond 1990 business as a whole could no longer rely on the old assumptions.

He thought there were many reasons for this. But foremost in his mind was that companies no longer just produce goods and services customers buy. Organizations now actually report to the customer as the boss. This is true whether companies understand it or not.

Furthermore, Peter Drucker wonders why CEOs and boards of directors have allowed their focus to divert from the customer to the shareholder.


Let’s get down to every day reality for a few seconds.

You know how it is when you have a product question or you have decided to make a purchase. When the buying moment happens, it’s as if the business world were conspiring against keeping you from spending your money. That is particularly true if you have a question that the web site either does not answer or demands excessive time on your part to research.

Your natural course of action to cut through the web site step and get the answers to your questions is to call a sales person. So you go to the manufacturer’s web site for the contact information. But you search in vain for the sales phone number. In many instances, you will never find the contact address or phone number because it isn’t there. If it does exist on the web site, it is often hidden under layers of clicks hoping  you will abandon the phone contact idea and search the web site more thoroughly.

I truly believe that many companies today make it quite clear they DO NOT WANT TO TALK TO YOU. After all, you are just an over-demanding customer the company serves reluctantly.

Then you try to beat the system by trying to call customer service instead of the sales area. The reasoning is that you are not a customer yet, but as a customer, you must wield some clout with the company.

That’s a no-go because you do not have the product serial number allowing you access to a live person. Or they want you to pay a service fee for product support first before they will talk with you.

At that point, you are ready to punch “O” on the phone with your clenched fist just to get out of the number-punching merry-go-round trap.

Great! You found a company with a live person to route your call by punching “0” on your phone pad! But wait, when you call, you have to ask the sales or customer support person to repeat every answer and question three times to understand it! It’s not a bad connection; it’s someone on the other side of the world who speaks a form of English you are not familiar with. And so the saga continues.

Why are companies so inept at customer service? Don’t they get it? Will they stay in business or prosper for long in a society that demands service above all?

In your view, do Companies really believe the customer is the boss?

Ted Grigg
What Ted does best is increase response by beating controls, applying multiple channels to target markets, profiling customer databases and generally improving sales results using deep direct marketing principles. Regard Ted as your personal “think-tank” for your direct marketing planning and strategy development. After analyzing several hundred million dollars of direct response testing in all channels, he brings with him the knowledge accumulated from seeing what tends to work and what does not. Having worked on both the agency and client side of direct marketing, Ted understands the unique challenges faced by agencies and their clients. Agencies need to sell themselves and deliver sales results. And clients not only require results, but need ideas they can implement while focusing on tracking response using a relational database. If Ted brings nothing else to the table, by profiling customer databases and creating response propensity models, he quickly becomes the clients’ expert on their own customers. His formal training includes a BA from Abilene Christian University and two years of graduate work at Texas Tech University. For a national direct-to-consumer insurance company, Ted developed a revolutionary direct mail format that beat most standing direct mail controls for this company. He also generated more profitable business for this firm by expanding compiled list circulation of less than 10% to more than 30% of total direct mail circulation within a year. (Insurance business generated by direct mail demonstrated higher persistency than customers coming from other media such as print and DRTV.) Ted’s plan and implementation of Medicare lead generation campaigns for over 60 regional and national HMO/PPO organizations combined multiple channels that surpassed some sales projections by as much as 60%. Additional industry experience over the last 30 years includes B2B or B2C for finance, securities, home security, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, government, technology, nonprofit, retail, transportation, communications, and multiple categories in the services industry. As the founder of Wyse Direct (a division for Wyse Advertising in Cleveland, OH), he successfully launched and branded a new technology product for Seiko-Mead by supporting a nationwide sales team with a predictable flow of qualified sales leads. While a VP of new business development for the Grizzard Agency, Ted acted as the direct marketing strategist who refocused the agency’s culture to attract new commercial and fundraising accounts. At the time, Grizzard was essentially a direct mail fund raising production operation. His leadership and team building effectiveness prepared Grizzard for the eventual Omnicom acquisition and Grizzard’s successful integration into Omnicom’s large group of advertising agencies. An independent DM consultant, Ted continues to write numerous articles and conduct webinars on direct marketing techniques. He also wrote The HMO/PPO Marketing Plan — A Step-by-Step Guide publishing it through Executive Enterprises in New York City. During his youth, Ted was raised in Lille, France with his missionary family attending French schools becoming fluent in reading and writing French. Away from the job, Ted is a computer geek, blogger and science fiction buff!
http://www.dmcgresults.com
Previous

Beating controls --- Should you focus on the What or the Why?
Next

Only 35% of BtoB Marketers Track the Cost-Per-Sale in Their Lead Generation Efforts