Do your customer service professionals forget one of the basics of Customer Service 101 --and Good Manners 101 -- acknowleding and appolgozing when there's been a mistake or the customer has been inconvenienced? I find that this basic is ignored about 90% of the time. Here’s an example of someone who doesn’t:

I dashed into the LL Bean outlet in Concord, while in town on business, hoping to return an item before an appointment. What should have been a brief event stretched on as the computerized cash register kept freezing up.

After several failed attempts, my window of opportunity closed. I let the lady know that I needed to leave. She apologized profusely and asked if I lived nearby, so that I might easily return. I told her that I didn’t, but would stop by on the way back. She thanked me for my patience. When my meeting ended, I returned.

As I strode toward the counter, she looked up and headed in my direction. “I’m so glad you came back!” she said with a big smile. She then went on to explain that our transaction happened right in the middle of what they call a “five minute computer event.” She eagerly processed my order and thanked me again for my patience...

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"?