John Guaspari
EXCLUSIVE ONLINE COLUMNIST

It was the middle of the afternoon. About 2:30. New York City. I had been leading an audience of about 75 people through a seminar since 8:30 that morning on the topic of "How to Make Sure You Keep the Customer's Perspective in Mind as You Implement Process Improvement Activities."

The seminar was a public one, so those 75 people came from about 60 different companies, and those 60 companies represented nearly every imaginable industry. The challenge in such situations lies in presenting a message that is focused enough to be of some practical use while still being general enough to apply to a wide range of businesses.

I thought I was doing a pretty effective job of this. Then a quiet little guy in the back of the room raised his hand and offered the following observation: "I run a small business here in the city, so I'm not as sophisticated as the other people here today. But I think you're makin' things way more complicated than they gotta be. 'Cause whenever my people lose focus, there's one thing I tell 'em: 'The customer has the money, and we want it.' They seem to get the message."

Whereupon the other 74 people broke out in laughter and applause as I smiled good-naturedly and made a mental note not to call on that quiet little guy again.

Pretty good story, don't you think? In less than 250 words you got a sense of what the event was like, heard about how a blowhard seminar leader got his ego utterly deflated and picked up an invaluable bit of folk wisdom: The customer does in fact have the money, we do in fact want it, and our job is to figure out what we need to do to get him to give it to us. Case closed.

Stories do that. A good story, well-told, has enormously rich and dense information content. The storyteller has already done the work of boiling things down to their essence. The listener implicitly understands the conventions of storytelling--there's a beginning, a middle and an end, and it makes a point--so there is no need to talk about the rules. No need to translate. There is little "friction loss," if you will.

Which raises an interesting question: Can you tell your customers' "buying story," i.e., why in the final analysis they decided to give their money to you rather than to the other guy? Boiled down to its essence? No waste? No friction loss?

Consider these words from a customer of an overnight delivery service: "I'm busy. I've got enough on my mind already without having to worry about whether a package I sent got to where it was supposed to on time. Sure, the service I use is a little more expensive than some of its competition. But the minute I hand the package to the courier, I can forget about it. That's what I really get from them."

Or these words from a customer of a fast-food restaurant chain: "When it's late at night and I'm on the interstate on my way to a bunch of sales calls, I don't want to be doing any culinary experimentation. It may not be five-star food, but when I see their sign, I know exactly what I'm going to get. No surprises."

Or these words from the owner of a mid-sized, mid-priced car: "I get kidded all the time about my car. People say it's dull, boring. But I say, great. It starts when I want it to and gets me where I want to go. What more could I want? For me, when it comes to cars, boring is good."

Now, to be sure, to have customers tell stories like these, a lot must have been going on inside those companies. That kind of reliability, predictability and consistency in performance doesn't just happen. It comes from understanding and mastering the tools, techniques and principles of quality and process improvement.

And therein lies the challenge. The more deeply and intensely we look into our work processes, the easier it is to lose sight of why we're worrying about those processes in the first place. That's why the exercise of developing and promulgating your customers' buying stories so that everyone in your organization understands them (and can tell them!) is so worthwhile. Keep them short and crisp--less than 100 words--so that they cut through all the noise and clutter.

As a customer might put it: "Thank you for putting in the time and effort to gain all that quality and process expertise. If I wanted to worry about all the things you worry about in running your business, I wouldn't be your customer. I'd be your competitor. But I don't, and I'm not.

"That's what I'm paying you for. Or not paying you for, as the case may be."

About the author

John Guaspari is president of Guaspari & Salz Inc., a Concord, Massachusetts-based management consulting firm. The books he has written include I Know It When I See It and The Customer Connection.