Success Is Customer Perception
By
Hayden Jones
Managing Consultant
By now, many of you know that I enjoy sailing. I also enjoy taking
guests (let’s assume they are my customers) sailing. But what I enjoy
about sailing might not meet the expectations of my guests. I may be
having a great time while the boat heels to 35º and water rolls over the
gunnels, or when the boat sloshes up and down (and up and down) through
the waves, or when we listen to Jimmy Buffett CDs while sitting in 98º
heat with no wind to be found. I may think it’s a great sail while my
guests turn a color somewhere between yellow and green and begin begging
to go home.
You may think things are great, but your customers may be turning
yellowish green because things are not great for them. My point is that
you must measure success not by your standards, but by your customers’
standards.
A few years ago, I was working with a training department. They were
extremely proud of the number of classes they held, the number of
trainees they “got through” the claims training program, and their
graduation rate. As I recall, they graduated 97 percent of the people
who took the classes. They were sailing without regard to their
customers’ expectations. They looked at the training activity and the
graduation rate as measures of success. However, of the 97 percent who
“got through” the training, 30 to 40 percent were unable to perform the
job for which they had been trained.
The managers of the claims department (the yellowish-green customers)
who were receiving these newly trained employees were frustrated by the
high number of the new employees who couldn’t perform their jobs at an
acceptable level. Many had to be retrained by the claims department.
Those who could not be trained the second time were let go after a
lengthy termination process.
In this situation, the training department felt it was doing an
excellent job, whereas the claims department felt the training
department was a failure. It’s the classic example of judging success by
an incorrect standard.
Instead of looking at the number of classes conducted or the graduation
rate, the training department should have studied the impact or results
of their training effort. An outcome where 30 to 40 percent of the
graduates are ineffective and require retraining does not reflect
success. In such a case, it is critical to get the two departments to
work through the problem to:
