Web Sight - Let Your Customers Lead

This problem is not specific to car companies or to older, established companies. It also exists in young companies. Right now, everybody is following the "product-category.com" model: lightbulbs.com, pants.com, Pets.com. There's even a Web site called JustBalls.com, where you can buy tennis balls, golf balls, and so on. Does anyone actually think that I, as a customer, have loyalty to a site that serves as the front end of a supply chain for balls? But that's what passes for e-commerce these days.

What's the right way for companies to think about the Web?

Business leaders need to stop thinking about the Internet as a bunch of computers connected together. The Internet is millions of people connected together. If the Net were to blow up tomorrow, those people would find another way to reach one another. We're in the midst of a customer-led revolution. Your customers are determined to find one another. Your only option is to encourage them to do so.

Take, for example, one of my experiences in the physical world. I was recently in the market for speaker cables for my stereo system. Believe it or not, you can pay $20,000 for one pair of the cables that connect your speakers to your amps. At one store, the cable "expert" said that for my speakers, he wouldn't recommend any cables that cost less than $1,300. I was looking through a 20-page brochure for these expensive cables, when a fellow customer walked over to me. He had read a head-to-head comparison of the cheapest cable brands and the most expensive cable brands. The conclusion? The average person can't hear the difference between $100 cables and those that cost thousands. Now, this is a person who reads all of the electronics magazines, who is really into this stuff, and who has no stake in my decision. Which guy am I going to trust -- him or the so-called expert? I bought a pair of fairly cheap cables, and I'm quite happy with them.

Multiply my little experience by a factor of millions, and you'll get an idea of how the Net reinvents relationships -- among customers, and between companies and their customers. Let the inmates run the asylum! Let the passengers steer the bus! Don't redesign your Web site. Redesign your company.

Isn't it dangerous to let your customers use your Web site to say anything that they want to say?

It's dangerous not to let them. These days, just about every customer is becoming an e-customer. (Soon, I hope, we'll be able to drop the "e" and just call everyone a "customer" again.) E-customers aren't loyal to a brand, or to a product category, or to a supply chain. They're loyal to other customers and to company employees with whom they've established relationships. The role of a Web site is to serve as a magnet for customers. And you can't create a magnet without the pull of open, honest conversation among customers.

Any company that thinks its customers aren't finding ways to connect with one another is smoking Web crack. Any company that thinks it "owns" its customers isn't going to be able to handle the G-forces that are sweeping through the marketplace. Any company that really believes that the information on its Web site corresponds to what customers want is in for a rude awakening. How many times have you sent an email to a friend saying, "You've got to check out this site. The message from the CEO is awesome"? Zero.

I can't name a single company that wouldn't claim that its customers always come first -- no matter what.

But the reality is that most companies have an allegiance not to customers but to existing products and services. I've consulted on a couple of hundred Web sites. And whether the company that I'm working with is a startup or an industry giant, the people around the table always have a "vision" for their site. I hear phrases like "authoritative source" and "market leader" and "reinforce our brand." Where's the customer in all of that? If you don't start with the right questions, then you'll end up with the wrong answers.

Over the next five years, every company will have to answer two questions. First: Who are our most important customers? And second: How do we put those customers in charge of our company? Answering both of those questions will require a radical shift in strategic assumptions and leadership mind-sets. Most companies believe that the way you grow fast is by saying yes to as many customers as possible. In fact, saying no is the new growth strategy: Think hard about who your best customers are, and do everything you can to serve them -- even if that means saying no to other customers.

Wait a minute. You want companies that are obsessed with growth to start rejecting customers who want to do business with them?