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Mothers in the small Swiss village of Bulach may have been wary of the man with a goatee staring at them as they struggled to navigate an ATM, grocery bag in one hand, fractious child in the other. But the man didn't care what their PIN numbers were or how much money they had in their accounts. He wanted to know, Why didn't they just put the bag down?

The answer: The bags were paper, and when the ground is wet--it rains a lot in Switzerland--putting them down means getting the contents soggy. Now, thanks to the man with the goatee, Stephan Kubler, the moms using the ATM at the Credit Suisse branch in Bulach can keep their groceries dry, by resting them on an inch-high grille.

Kubler spends each and every working day spying on Credit Suisse customers. He's part of a small team led by customer-experience renegade David McQuillen, a 36-year-old American who's challenging the top executives at the blue-chip Swiss bank to get out of their Zurich offices and--gulp!--meet some customers.

Almost every company has something about customer focus in its mission statement. Trouble is, the larger the organization, the more executives tend to insulate themselves from customers. Some rely on customer-satisfaction surveys and focus groups. Others simply assume that customers are just like them.

No, they're not, says McQuillen. And the problem with thinking they are is that companies end up creating products and processes that suit them, not their customers. "You need," he says, "to go out and talk to customers to find out what they want."

The "experience immersion" is his way of forcing busy executives to do just that. The two-hour exercise begins with a visit to three local bank branches. At the first branch, McQuillen teaches execs how to watch customers; at the second, they complete a typical customer task, such as exchanging foreign currency; and at the third branch, they're given a few questions to ask actual customers--by far the most intimidating task. Back in McQuillen's office, the executives visit the bank's Web site and attempt to check the interest rate for a mortgage or find out which bank cards can be used abroad. And they try to fill out credit-card application forms.

Each session, says McQuillen, yields results. Two of the branches visited during immersions are now being redesigned at the request of participating execs. Another manager, who was forced to cool his heels in a long line, kicked off a project to reduce waiting time. Christoph Brunner, COO of Credit Suisse's private-banking unit, realized that "in some cases, we actually make it hard for customers to do business with us. [I saw] that little things make a big difference. For example, just having signage that people understand. Having friendly and helpful employees. As a bank, we often think that only the financial products themselves matter--but there is so much more that goes around that."

The idea for the immersion came from a presentation McQuillen made in 2004 to 200 of the bank's senior managers. Most were paying more attention to their BlackBerrys until McQuillen announced he was about to make a call, from the stage, to a Credit Suisse service center. "I saw fear in their faces, because they didn't know what the experience was going to be. We have 5 million customer interactions every month, and I realized then that if our senior managers didn't know what was going on in those interactions, the CEO probably didn't know, either." In fact, Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Korner appreciated the immersion so much that he instructed all of his direct reports to do it too.