How You Can Help Them

Every company says it's customer-focused. Every mission statement promises great customer service. All executives claim they want close customer relationships. Don Peppers knows how to put the rhetoric to the test. "Do you know who your customers are?" he asks. "If a regular customer came into your store, would you recognize him? Are you tracking your regular customers on a regular basis? Do you have membership cards for your retail customers and email addresses for your business customers?"

According to Peppers, great service happens only when you relate to your customers "one to one." To do that, you have to identify your customers, differentiate them, interact with them, and finally, customize your products or services to meet their needs. It's a process that Peppers spells out with coauthor Martha Rogers in two best-selling books, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (Currency/Doubleday, 1993) and Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age (Currency/Doubleday, 1997). As an evangelist for this new approach to customer service, Peppers maintains a full speaking schedule and, through his consulting firm Marketing 1:1, advises such blue-chip clients as AT&T, PaineWebber, Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu, and EDS.

When Fast Company asked Peppers how he would evaluate a company's customer service performance, he offered four simple questions: Do you treat different customers differently? Do you create a learning relationship with your customers? Do you keep your customers? Do you organize around customers?

To complement Peppers's answers to these questions, Fast Company interviewed key innovators at four operations with cutting-edge approaches to customer service: the Willow Creek Community Church, Hitachi Data Systems, General Electric Medical Systems, and PeopleSoft. These profiles offer tools for delivering great service that you can apply today. Your own customers will benefit from these tools -- after you customize them, of course.

Do you treat different customers differently?

Some customers are simply worth more to you than others are. And different customers also need different things from you. The rule is, treat different customers differently.

You should differentiate customers first by their value to you and then by their needs. It's simple: you don't want to waste time differentiating low-value customers by their needs, because you don't want to create a high-cost relationship with a low-value customer. Once you know who your highest-value customers are, you can differentiate them according to what they need.

You can even differentiate customers who seem to need the same thing. Simply expand your relationship into needs that aren't so uniform. For instance, if you're a phone company, you might think that all customers need the same thing from you: a clear, immediate connection. And in a way that's true: you can't do much to customize a phone call. But you can customize the bundle of services that surround the phone call.

Take invoicing. If I'm a business customer of a phone company, every month I get an inch-thick pile of paper -- the phone company's invoice. What if the company gave me the invoice on a disk or if I could download it from a Web site? My accounting department could allocate the costs a lot faster and a lot more efficiently. Then we would return the information to the phone company with our own notations. Next month the invoice comes from the phone company with the costs predistributed the way we want them. Each cycle, the billing process gets faster, easier, more accurate, more customized.

That's the fundamental principle of the customer service relationship: the more each customer teaches you about what she wants, the more you can make it or deliver it that way, and the more difficult it is for her to take her business elsewhere.

Do you create a learning relationship with your customers?

Here's the underlying idea: the customer teaches the provider how to give him the service he wants, and that installed base of knowledge makes the bond extremely tight. That's a learning relationship -- a relationship that gets smarter with every interaction. It's the linchpin of customer loyalty.

To make that happen, you have to find the most cost-efficient and effective ways of interacting with your customers. That's how you learn what they want and how valuable they are to you. The people at Dell excel at this. When you order a computer from Dell, they start by asking you what you need the computer to do. Is it your first computer? Are you going to use it only at home, or is it for home and work? Will kids use it? Do you want to do presentations on it? Do you have a printer? Do you need a printer? Will you be doing graphics? Are you ever going to be on the Internet? Then they recommend a particular configuration based on your answers.