Telepathy
You and your employees need to have telepathy. You have to be able to anticipate the future. Your organization must assume a proactive stance as it relates to all your customers’ needs. You have to foresee any and all potential problems that could crop up before they do crop up. You also need to recognize the patterns that are indicative of future success or failure or future opportunities.
I was in a focus group with business owners where the moderator asked what kind of TV character summed up what their organization is like. What character defined their company’s personality? There were some really interesting answers from everyone, with a wide variety of characters from the past few decades—everyone from Mary Tyler Moore to George Jefferson. The best answer I heard was Radar O’Reilly from M*A*S*H. In case you are too young to remember Radar, he had the uncanny knack for understanding what was going to happen before it ever did. He was always in the right place, at the right time, with the right solution for that particular crisis. He continually saved the day, but he always did it in a quiet, unassuming way. He didn’t expect to get the credit; he just wanted things to go well. While his loyalties may have been split internally at times, he never wavered from his clear customer focus. The wounded and the maimed were his only priority, and he would do literally anything to improve their condition. To that extent, Radar O’Reilly might be the most customer-driven character in TV history.
You want to have that kind of predictive power in your organization. One of the best ways to do that is to make it easy to communicate with your company, especially to complain. You want your best customers to tell you how they think things are going, even when they are not going well. That tells you what they really want and what they are willing to pay you to do for them. They will give you the best indication of the actions you need to take to improve and grow. As we learned in the Potato Chip Story in Chapter 4, you need to understand your customers better than they understand themselves. Your customers may not know how you can solve their problems, but they can certainly tell you about their points of pain. Find a way to solve those pain points. You then need to find out what they really want but haven’t told you yet.
