Over the holidays, several times I caught myself experiencing a knee-jerk negative reaction to less than customer-centric behavior by companies supposedly being among the customer-centric elite. For example, Southwest Airlines is vigorously opposing a proposed new FAA regulation mandating more rest for pilots between flights. Not very customer-friendly behavior, considering the significant percentage of fatal air crashes resulting from pilot fatigue.

But in this case and others, I found myself fighting against allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. Southwest IS a very customer-centric company, overall. So is Verizon Wireless, especially against the backdrop of a customer-unfriendly industry. So is McDonalds, even while pushing back against proposed new food labeling laws. And won’t applying “purity tests” penalize such companies for making all the progress they’ve made?

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to forgive a Best Buy for preaching customer-...

Although far from a majority, the percentage of companies with customer-centric strategies continues rising. But then what? Well, in so many cases what comes next is a major disconnect. Once the customer-centric intent is established, next should come customer-centric process redesign (including designing enabling technology) that should change intent into action.

Unfortunately, what does happen instead is process design that covers its cost-control roots with a customer fig leaf. Companies wheel out production-based process schemas practiced by production-trained process designers and get production-based process – that adds only tangential benefits to customers.

Personally, I’d rather train process untrained people in the principles of customer-centric process and turn them loose, rather than bring in the Lean/Six Sigma troops. What do you think?

FYI, here’s a link to an excellent CustomerThink post addressing this issue by Joseph Drager (...

What could be worse than buying very expensive product that hugely affects your business success – from an industry misaligned with its customers?

The realization is finally sinking in that process redesign and acquiring new technology – in that sequence – is really two phases of a single step. Like walking. You pick your foot up, then you put it down. Doing only the “up” or the “down” doesn’t get you far. Same for process and technology. Streamlining process almost always requires new systems enablement, because ineffective systems are more often than not the primary process impediment. And buying new software systems without first redesigning process just helps you do the wrong stuff faster.

But if this is true, and I maintain it is, why should customers have to buy these two, intertwined components from different providers who rarely even know each other? And what’s the fix?

PS: Sorry to be absent for so long. I’ve had a pair of enterprise process redesigns...

As part of enabling new process for clients where we’re replacing software E2E, I reviewed for clients on the net and through follow-up over 100 software systems and applications during Q2. Way more than enough to see clear seller patterns as well as assess my own response patterns.

Software web sales approaches – and the web is the only practical way to screen as many vendors as possible within a segment – fall into 2 segments:

1. Companies that tease with scant information on websites but require personal contact for the evaluator to learn enough about products to develop an informed opinion

2. Companies that may request information before allowing access to online demos, yet provide enough “meat” on the web and through demos – including rough price ranges – for evaluators to screen out systems that don’t meet process enabling requirements or cost realities

The seller patterns are what they are. But I’d like your opinions on my reactions. I believe...