Reducing Customer Casualties

By Michael B. Tatham, President, The Tatham Group

You would think that a recession might wake organizations up and make them focus on reducing customer casualties.  And many spend a lot of time and money working on this issue.  However, no matter how hard organizations try to ‘create customer focus’ the business is disconnected and therefore is just not capable.  If you keep doing what you’ve always done…

Recently at Tatham we had a piece of equipment producing poor quality output.  After many experiments, the root cause remained elusive.  After diligently explaining the situation to the service department, and all the experiments we had run, they decided to call in a service representative to take a look.

First disconnect: Upon his arrival we had to explain the entire issue over again including the experiments we ran.  Déjà vu?

Second disconnect: Immediately, we were informed that what we were using the machine for was not what it was designed for (even though it was specifically recommended to us by the sales department).  Annoyance.

Third disconnect: He did not have the right tools with him to diagnose the problem.  Frustration.

The Path of Most Resistance

By Laurie Clarke,  COO, The Tatham Group

As I’m about to become a new parent, I am receiving a lot of parenting tips and advice.  Some I seek.  Most are offered upon spotting my unmistakable baby bump.  I have stopped wasting my time explaining to these many strangers that they are not considering the customer, me, when they share horror stories or unsolicited advice on how to avoid their mistakes or replicate their successes.

Setting my customer focus issues aside, I decided to go with the flow. I am a firm believer that everyone can teach you something and the collective knowledge of hundreds of parents must be greater than my own.  I made the decision to block out anything that will worry or terrify me and accept the other advice for consideration.

Of course, my Tatham mind kicks in and I start to turn these encounters into an opportunity.  I began to ask questions and categorize the answers.  Very quickly I saw a pattern.  The biggest regrets were other people’s biggest success – a parent must always follow the path of most resistance.

Finding Elegance in a Handful of Nails

By Michael Tatham Jr., President, The Tatham Group

I started working in the company at what I thought was the lowest level – producing training materials and processing customer orders. What I learned in this role were the key components to the success of any company: there is no role more important than one that services the customer, the more simple a process is the more elegant and everyone plays a critical part if the company is integrated.

More importantly, I learned the critical success factor for our company over the past forty years: our human nature leads us toward complexity. It is the desire to please, challenge or prove worthiness; the creation of rules, roles and processes to make ourselves feel special; the fear of losing control that creates a convoluted path to the customer receiving what they need; inability to accept and admit failure in order to learn from it; and many more. Since birth our environment has reinforced these behaviors making it difficult for us to change to an environment of success that requires less resources to maintain.