Remembering the Customer

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in performing a task or completing a project we forget a basic rule of thumb: who the customer is.

One time in my career I worked inside a large corporation in a communications department.  My boss was a quite demanding and exacting person.  In a side discussion with a coworker (she and I both reported to the same boss, this perfectionist), she reminded me that the customer wasn’t my internal customer, the guy asking for the resulting project I was working on.

It was, in fact, our boss.  “The customer lives behind that door,” my friend said as she pointed to our boss’ door.

She couldn’t have been more right.

While there are people who write checks to our company, who make the demands of our time as we produce work for them and clearly seem to be control of us, the real “customer” is the one who makes judgements about your worklife and actually signs their name on the bottom of your paycheck.

While this might seem extreme, the point of writing all of this is that we must all be clear on to whom we really answer to.  If you are a solo entrepreneur or a cog in a bigger company, you answer to someone, maybe even yourself.  Once you know who this is (and it could be multiple people, based upon the situation), make sure you target this person as your customer and treat them accordingly.

The customer deserves your undivided attention and while they may be wrong, there are creative ways to tell them they are full of it without insulting them or making them angry enough to fire them.

I write this as a project to which I am assigned is reaching a critical point.  My boss is the customer as it is his project, not the board of our organization and not the customers paying the bills (sponsors and attendees).  It is difficult to make everything align for everybody, but at the end of the day, the boss has to be satisfied, even if it means that the end product doesn’t meet the needs of the intended paying customer. It is important to balance the whole act, but truth be told if you meet the objectives the boss wants, you will succeed.

The audience of one always wins.

Relentless

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