What does it mean to be “Accountable to your customers?”
Yesterday, I was eating lunch when one of my pet peeves occurred. I was having lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, and I ordered chicken strips with barbecue sauce for dipping. When the food came, it was brought by someone other than my waiter – who did the “drop and run” maneuver, putting my food in front of me and getting the heck out of there before I noticed that – you got it – there was no barbecue sauce.
Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a big deal; I would have simply asked my waiter for the sauce. Except that my waiter wasn’t the one who brought the food, and by the time I noticed, there was no one to ask. Finally I had to run down my waiter, and he got the sauce. It was more an annoyance than anything, but it reminded me of something that too many companies do – they manage to remove the accountability from anyone who is dealing with customers.
This happens a lot in companies where one set of people sells the new account, and another group services it, and the initial salespeople drop out of communication with the customer. On the face of it, this looks like an efficient use of time and resources on the part of the company; after all, the people who are best at doing the selling maximize their time doing the selling. HOWEVER – what happens is that you lose a lot of the accountability to the customer. This happens because the servicing salespeople don’t necessarily feel bound by the promises made by the account acquisition salespeople – and the acquisition salespeople aren’t that interested in a successful service experience, because they’re only compensated for bringing the account on.
In this case, the waiter that dropped my food off was perfectly OK with executing the drop-and-run, because whatever tip I left wasn’t going to him. My primary waiter, on the other hand, assumed that the food came out correctly – and if there was a problem, there was no one who was immediately there to solve it.
In today’s market, we are more and more accountable to our customers, and that means that sales and service must constantly stay in contact with our customers and work together to maintain and manage the relationship. If you don’t, the consequences could be more severe than some missing barbecue sauce.
