We all know from personal experience how this plays out on the customer front lines. You call Microsoft, Intuit, HP or whatever’s customer support and get someone speaking a barely intelligible version of your language (if you’re lucky). This person is obviously measured on call count, because he keeps pushing to end the call, problem resolved or not. I even had an HP call marked “successfully closed” or some such despite the “tech” unable to even identify my admittedly exotic monitor, never mind know how to rotate the screen 90 degrees back to normal.

But “behind the lines,” including at management levels, I see stress from excess workload, micromanagement enabled by micro-measurement and fear of losing a job keep internal concerns, including self-preservation, ascendant over customer concerns. Work is becoming more and more about pleasing the boss, which is often antithetical to pleasing customers. Our “pressure-cooker” corporate environments are not conducive to putting customers first.

Your thoughts?

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Rephrasing the question, how far will customer-centric attitude and desire to help customers take an organization?

In my mind, not very far. Yes, process is my practice focal point, but I don’t believe I’m being biased. After every customer relationship audit, I come up with change recommendations that can be categorized as: “behavioral;” “process-based;” “process plus technology” based. The latter two categories almost always dominate the list.

What do you think?

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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-centricity while they’re completely falling off the wagon.  But shouldn’t we (myself included) cut the relatively good actors some slack?

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I’ve read and heard many starry eyed, wistful, expressions binding employee-centricity to customer-centricity, and the corollary.  It’s a warm and fuzzy, feel-good thought. And it ain’t true.

For example, retail shoppers are getting more and more revved up about “Black Friday” (day after Thanksgiving Christmas shopping, for those across the ponds). They’ve even pushed many stores to open at Thursday midnight – technically 12:00 Friday morning). Employees hate it. How would you like to eat a BIG, sleep-inducing dinner and down a LARGE volume of accompanying wine, sleep a couple of hours and then stagger off to work? How the hell can you enjoy the holiday all edgy over having to drag your butt off the couch, climb in your car and head off to work at Target, Best Buy, wherever? Hey, your car may even get so ticked off it won’t start. And when you get there, you get to witness shoppers stomping over dying people (literally) and dousing each other with pepper spray to get the last, latest Apple gadget.

This is classic “customer vs. employee,” and there’s no pleasing both sides. In fact, we can all come up with many examples of opposing interests between customers and employees. We need to wipe the stars out of our eyes and deal with this “unpleasant truth.”

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Next year, U.S. political candidates will bombard U.S. voters with unprecedented numbers of political messages emanating from an unprecedented number of communication sources. These politicians and their communicators arm themselves with scads of data slicing and dicing the voting populace into a myriad of overlapping cells – and even individual households. These data tell them where and where not to campaign, depending on demographics, psychographics, past voting patterns and the like. And they will even help candidates decide what to say – in person, on the stump.

Nonetheless, political communication is almost all single message “push.” Candidates and their handlers craft messages to appeal to the entire mass populace – not little cells, never mind individuals. Just like marketers do, and we all know most marketers aren’t the most customer-friendly types. And when the winners get to wherever they’re going, they’re driven by percentages, not people – and by the loudest voices, never the most thoughtful. This is one reason there’s such a politician – voter gap, with voters constantly unhappy they “didn’t get what they voted for” – because politicians don’t understand what they really want.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful instead if politicians actually practiced the two-way communication they brag about every time they say, “I listen to my constituents.” Yeah, right. And that the common interests of diverse but reasoned voices drove their votes, as should happen in a democracy. You know – becoming voter-centric by hearing all voices instead of counting the loudest, and by putting themselves in voter shoes and actually walking the voters’ walk.

Or would it be all that wonderful?

We can talk customer-centric process specifically until we’re blue in the face, but if we can’t manage process in general it’s all talk. In among the best blog posts I’ve read in memory, Thomas Olbrich of Taraneon Consulting in Hamburg picks up on a conversation comparing U.S and European process we started several years back – and elevates it to a new level of perception. If you’re wondering why implementing customer-centric process is so tough, you must read Thomas’ incisive remarks.

http://tinyurl.com/74uqqzh

A lightly edited excerpt:

“BPM in US companies has two extreme positions and practically no middle ground: either processes are a top management topic, but as an abstract concept only; or, process lives only at the business analyst and operations level – lots of work in the trenches of daily business but so buried beneath methods and tools process fails to get noticed. Accountability for processes? Nada. Process organisation? Nada. Middle management as the link between business strategy and processes? Doesn’t exist.

“By contrast continental Europe prides itself on its wait and see approach (nastier minds than mine would call it complacency or even ignorance) with the consequence that once they do pick up on an idea someone’s bound to come in to tell them that it’s old hat and they should be looking at what’s new instead.”

If you’re wondering why implementing customer-centric process in either continent (and elsewhere, such as in Australia) is so difficult, you must read this.

Last week I lamented the lack of media coverage of consumer debit card fee pushback, and I should have been more specific and said coverage of the consumers who are pushing back, not the banks themselves. No matter, because events proved me wrong, and I’m greatly encouraged by consumer-focused stories that emerged as soon as I said there weren’t any .

A spate of pieces appeared last week, covering not only the consumer side but small business as well leaving large banks in droves. AP even chronicled the efforts of a part-time nanny in DC who on her own started an online petition against debit card fees – which attracted 150,000 “signatures.” Another interesting data element – more consumers joined US credit unions in October than during all last year.

Has anyone else encountered interesting media reports?

We can count on the media to trumpet tales of business sticking it to customers – like the recent spate of disgusting debit card fees big banks imposed to offset losses from the federally mandated lower transfer fees. But we absolutely can’t count on them trumpeting customers sticking it to business – like fierce customer forcing banks to roll back these abhorrent fees as fast as they imposed them.

Although we’ll have to celebrate in media silence, we should all bow our heads with respect for what consumers just accomplished. But could this be the turning point in bank – consumer relations many of us have been anticipating?

What do you think?

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 (http://preview.tinyurl.com/3coz39a). I’ve added my 2 cents.

Many (including myself) have prematurely predicted that consumers would express their anger at big banks with their feet – by fleeing to smaller banks and credit unions less inclined to gouge them. Having been wrong before, I won’t make another prediction. But the number of market and industry watchers making the prediction is rapidly swelling.

So I’ll ask for sage opinions from all reading – “Have increased debit card fees, mortgage fraud and other customer abuses finally brought U.S. consumers at least to the tipping point? And what’s the future of big bank – consumer relations?”