I was speaking at a conference this week and overheard another speaker mention an interview with an airline official he read in USA Today. The airline spokesperson was talking about the bane of every traveler’s existence: lost baggage. The official proudly stated that they get 99.5% of the bags handled to the right destination. While at first glance, this seems like something to be proud of, it takes on a different meaning when you consider that 2 million bags are handled by the airlines everyday.

This statistic now translates into 10,000 bags each day getting lost, or 10,000 individuals or families who were either inconvenienced or whose vacations were made less enjoyable. Multiply that by 365 days a year and that makes it 3.65 million people a year have a bad airline experience just due to mishandled baggage.

I bring this up, not to critique the 99.5% success rate, but to illustrate the difference between a business being "Us Centric" and "Customer Centric." The official was clearly thinking about the statistic from an "Us Centric" viewpoint: "Aren’t we great? We only screw up 0.5% of the time!" He wasn’t viewing it in terms of the number of customers each year who have bad experiences due to bag handling mistakes. His perspective, unfortunately, reflects that of many business owners and executives.

Many, if not most, businesses are "Us Centric" – organizing their processes around their own convenience, rather than the customers’ (think banker’s hours years back, hospital johnnies that leave your derierre exposed, or "return for store credit only" policies in retail stores). They are not designed from the customer’s point of view.

So What?

A couple of questions to ask:

1. Do you consciously design your customer service experiences from your customers’ perspective or are they all about you, and your convenience?

2. Do you consciously ask "How can we make it easier for people to do business with us than our competition?

3. Have we asked our customers how we can be more "Customer Centric"?

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