The
chances of any one person getting hit by lightning are something like 0.01
percent, but as they say, if you happen to be the one who gets struck, those
odds just went up to 100 percent. There's a business parallel to that bit of
fun-with-numbers: One person may represent 0.01 percent of your customer base
(or 5 percent or 20 percent), but when they are dealing with you it now becomes
100 percent of that population.
Of
course, good people working for good customer service organizations always
laser-focus on the individual with whom they are dealing at any given time (at
least we hope so). But in the broader thinking of a company, it is typical to
consider customers in the aggregate -- whether through policies and mottos like
"we give our customers our best every day," or internal company
policies like "all customers who claim they got defective units should be
offered a refund or exchange."
In the
normal course of business planning, marketing and operations, it's usually fine
to think of customers collectively. But there are situations when it's better
to think and behave as if you have only one.
The
one-customer mindset will serve you especially well when there is a large-scale
problem. Sooner or later, every business has an issue that affects a large
portion -- if not all -- of its customers. Could be a service interruption, a
defect or recall, extended stock outage, website glitch or a promotion that
backfires. When that happens, the natural reaction of some people and
organizations is to run around in a panic, like the sky is falling. I have
personally fallen into that trap and found that this disaster-scenario
mentality almost always leads to unnecessary (often extreme and
disproportionate) stress and distraction, which in turn leads to muddled
thinking, bad decisions and bad actions.
Now,
when we have an issue that affects a significant number of customers
(fortunately those problems are rare) I remind my colleagues, and myself, that
if we dwell on the theoretical number of people who might be affected --
that is, thinking of our customers communally and the problem globally -- we'll
just be freaking out until the issue is resolved. Imagining a room full of
phones ringing, emails pinging and torch-carrying mobs at the gate isn't
constructive. But if we remember that each customer only knows and cares about
his or her own situation (the "100 percent" anecdote I began with),
we are able to calm down and deal with manageable bites.
Instead
of worrying that "everyone" is going to be upset, as if all of your
customers are in a room together comparing notes, worry about that one customer
being upset, because -- unless you're a high-visibility company in the middle
of a class action or other PR nightmare -- that's usually the way your
customers are thinking. Figuring out, whether philosophically or literally, how
you'll handle that one customer will bring clarity and likely lead to the best,
fastest and least stressful resolution for all involved.
To be
clear, this may not change the inevitable scope or cost of a problem. But
again, the individual customer neither knows nor cares about that. One-customer
thinking averts panic, converts emotional energy to productive energy and
creates the right mindset for coming up with the best solution. Figure out the
best way to help your one customer, take care of them, repeat and extend to
customers as your only client. You'll find that most of these things don't wind
up being as bad as you think they will, and the sky usually won't fall.
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