OBSESSED IS DIFFERENT

Create Customer Obsession in Your Business

Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness.

—Michel de Montaigne

Captain Ahab, the monomaniacal character at the heart of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, was obsessed with the white whale. Not just interested. Not fascinated. He was totally obsessed by the beast that had taken his leg. When Ahab set out to harpoon his obsession, did he delegate the job of finding the white whale? Absolutely not. The crew of the Pequod thought they were hunting sperm whales, not traveling to the ends of the earth to destroy their captain’s obsession.

Ahab probably isn’t the best example of a leader. The mad captain’s obsession was a deadly one that concluded with a one-way trip to the bottom of the ocean, tethered to the whale. Yet when it comes to obsession—true obsession—it can sometimes be difficult to discern between genius and madness.

Surely, you have dealt with people who are obsessed with something. Perhaps with some pursuit like sports. The word fan, after all, is short for “fanatic.” What was your reaction to their obsession? Did they come across as weird, distracted, odd, excited, or hard to understand? Did anything else really matter to them? Perhaps their obsession even created some conflict between the two of you.

Although there are 14 leadership principles at Amazon, Leadership Principle 1 is “Customer Obsession,” and it is the first among equals of Amazon’s leadership principles. Isn’t “being customer focused” or “hearing your customer” good enough? To go from good to great, to “see around the corner” for your customer,¹ or to change an internal culture, obsession will deliver different insights.

CHIEF CUSTOMER OFFICER—BLECCH!

“Wanted: Seasoned executive to become a champion of the customer. Must be adept at breaking down organizational silos to create a persistent customer-first mentality across physical and digital channels. Requirements include diplomacy skills, an innovative spirit, customer service excellence, and a data-driven mindset.”²

In the eternal spirit of Mad Magazine, I say “blecch” whenever I hear the title of the latest management trend: chief customer officer (CCO). Don’t get me wrong. The description and skills needed are great. But wouldn’t it be better if everyone in the organization acted as the chief customer officer?

I appreciate that having a CCO might be a way to help start and accelerate customer obsession in your organization, but my concern is that having the role sends the exact opposite message to the rest of the organization. If everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job to be obsessed with the customer, the vast majority of your team is not doing it. If you are going to have a CCO, make sure this position’s first priority is to create a culture of customer obsession, so that being a customer advocate is everyone’s job. If successful, the role of CCO becomes pointless. Why? Because everyone’s doing it.

MAKE IT HAPPEN

What are the different methods of systematically creating and practicing customer obsession? Here’s a smattering of approaches:

1.   Use metrics that measure the customer experience. We will talk more about metrics in Idea 31, but create metrics that measure all phases of the customer experience. Find a way to measure it rather than just surveying it. This will lead to innovation. Be creative in measuring as much of the customer experience as possible, even in nondigital experiences. You can measure the waiting time customers are experiencing in a real-time manner. Don’t use “We are not a digital business or product” as an excuse.

2.   Create a voice of the customer program. Create a voice of the customer program that not only highlights a customer issue but also assigns prioritized action items and work for any teams needed to fix the root cause.

3.   Everything starts with describing “customer delight.” In your narratives, your results, your shareholder letters, your plans, your strategies, your documentation, start with describing what delights your customer about this topic. If you can’t identify the customer impact, should you be spending time on it?

4.   Manage by walking around. Spend considerable time as a customer, with your sales and service team, and interview the front line of your partners. Don’t rely too much on surveys because they don’t deliver many deep insights. Also, don’t rely solely on common proxies such as market reports or other summarized material—because they typically work only to confirm our opinion. Instead, you want to disconfirm your beliefs and opinions, and you want to understand the specific moments when you are disappointing a customer, gathering as many details of the situation as you can. Management by walking around (MBWA) is the practice of managers getting out of their ivory towers and spending time with customers and in the field so that they can gain better insight and empathy for what is really happening.

THE RESULTS ARE NOT JUST CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

By making customer obsession everyone’s job, you hope that customer satisfaction will improve. That would be great, but in baseball parlance, I consider this a “single.” Customer obsession leads to operational excellence, which we will discuss more in Idea 22. However, the “home run,” nay the “grand slam,” of customer obsession is to build on customer satisfaction and operational excellence. The grand slam is innovation and business model evolution—becoming inspired to develop and expand beyond your current products, services, and business model.

Amazon’s sophisticated logistics expertise did not come from wanting to be a supply chain company. It came from understanding that the customer experience was greatly affected by flexibility, speed, and quality of delivery. Amazon Web Services (AWS) did not come from wanting to be a cloud technology company but from needing to provide a scalable infrastructure to provide a great online customer experience.

Where could customer obsession lead you? Here’s a hint: it’s not to the bottom of the ocean, tethered to a whale. However, as we will discover in the next chapter, it’s not bad to have people on board with a little Ahab in them. As we’ll discuss, being “nice” all the time can be a liability for your team.