The Sale Is in the Details

But in today's marketplace customers have easy access to information, so they know immediately when a company fails its customers and can react swiftly, virtually, and globally. Suddenly, a minor cutback in customer service support like eliminating pillows can have a very big impact on quarterly earnings, not just customer satisfaction surveys.

Perhaps in this era of air rage, Delta and many of the other large airlines should take a page from Lands' End's customer focus.

Lands' End has created a strong brand by priding itself on providing small personal customer values such as shoehorns, extra buttons, and cedar bricks for storing its wool products. Customers have praised and come to expect these small, but emotionally important customer centricities. When product line managers looked for ways to tighten margins they sought to cut these added-value amenities. Kudos to Lands' End's leadership; they recognized the importance of these items to the customer experience and removed their costs from their product margins entirely. These costs along with others were placed in a customer investment account to ensure that bottom-line thinking never impacted the bottom-line experience.

Unlike Delta, American Airlines has also recognized the importance of customer centricity moving forward. Mark Mitchell, Managing Director of Customer Experience for American Airlines, a newly created position, recently noted that the company had "missed some opportunities to do the right thing in the last couple of years ... as we have tried to save our company financially." He was hired to look at all customer interaction points, from the boarding process to handling delays to cabin amenities in order to bring the corporate focus back to customers.

So, how do you bring customer focus to your entire company?
Well, inspirational posters and talking points won't get the job done. And change can't be relegated to solely training your customer service representatives.

You need to rethink your approach. Look at each arm of your company and how it creates or affects customer value. Then figure out how to communicate a customer-centric approach to employees and offer them incentives that encourage placing the customer first.

Where to start?

Change begins with a "C." It's your CFO, CTO, and COO, who will make a difference. Together, they'll form the nucleus that ensures buy-in from your CEO and Executive Board. The CFO will fight for your marketing budget in the boardroom because they understand that consumer decisions have financial ramifications. At the same time, your CTO is the point person for customer interactions with transactions shifting online; meaning that technology is no longer a cost center, but a profit center. Now you need operations and customer service to be synonymous, so that they can manage the selling of your brand and the upselling of the consumer.

Your company needs to begin and end with the customer's experience if you're going to maintain profitability. So, stop thinking about your business and employees as departments, units, and customer-facing employees. You all have to face the customer for as long as your doors are open.

Whether you're Delta, Lands' End, or Starbucks the customer experience can be more important than the product itself. The details make all the difference. When you start paring away the small customer centricities because of cost concerns, you might keep snipping until there's nothing left of your brand. You, and all your employees, should start thinking of your business as one department. The customer department.

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