All that had been set up was a means of sidestepping the issue, a screen, a decoy – the words are not too strong – which simply stand in as the symbols of listening, but they are not listening.12By dealing with listening as a function – an aspect of marketing in this case – the organization spares itself from taking a good hard look at itself, that is, more directly, at how appropriate its own modes of functioning are for the customer which it intends to serve. This is exactly what it needed to see. Listening to the customer, which has become so necessary, so inevitable now that the customer stands as the winner, confronts bureaucracies with very difficult and disturbing problems. Listening simply cannot be reduced to yet another function – bureaucracies excel at that – no more than quality could be reduced to a function in the 1980s, despite many attempts to do so.
Much more than a function, it is a mode of functioning, organization.
Listening is a set of behaviours, of arrangements, of cooperative efforts;
it includes how employees’ careers evolve, and through this their status in the company, their benefits, their privileges. In order to truly listen to the customer, one must begin by taking a closer look at all of these various domains. In many cases, listening can be quite painful.
the manager is paid a fixed salary, which increases with seniority and according to the relative clout of the restaurant for which he or she is responsible. Finally, we should point out that the regional director appoints the sector supervisors in the different regions, knowing that some of them have better reputations than others in terms of their prof- itability or “risk”, which boils down to customer loyalty.
As we focus on the day-to-day activities of this organization, we find several interesting facts:
● Relations between the regional directors and their sector supervisors are courteous and convivial, although it is fairly rare for them to meet given the expanse of each region. Overall, communication between these levels is fairly superficial. There is quite a bit of talk, but not much is said: there is often more discussion about daily life than about daily work.
● Sector supervisors themselves have few occasions to get together.
Their territories cover a lot of ground and they are responsible for a large number of restaurants. When they do meet up, once again we see conviviality; food is often served, for example, and once again work is not the major topic of discussion.
● Sector supervisors and managers seem to be subject to very intense pressure. The former are constantly complaining about this, to the extent that company directors are concerned and talk seriously about tackling the problem, although they do not have a clue how to go about it. Restaurant managers also suffer from pressure, but are less willing to discuss it openly. The reason is that they are the scape- goats within this organization: the regional director and sector super- visors agree that managers are not very competent and are therefore generally unable to take an objective view of the situation.
Management laments having to fire a certain number of them on a regular basis.
● In last place, there are the customers: those who, it is important to note, sign the contracts and not those who eat at the restaurants (whom we might call the guests). The customers express great satis- faction. They feel that the company, and more specifically the sector supervisors who are their real contacts, take good care of them, listen closely to their problems, and seem always to do their utmost to satisfy them. The customers and sector supervisors meet, moreover, outside of the workplace, in gatherings organized by the latter. The regional director, who deals only with several of the more significant clients, is not associated with these events. Finally, the customers The Customer’s Victory 33
share the negative opinion of the restaurant managers, whom they consider to be the weak link in the chain of this organization.
Satisfied customers, people who have been “listened to”: what differ- ences are there between this and the case of the telecommunications company which might explain these relationships? Certainly not the people involved and their loyalty, but the organization itself. Let us try to understand how it functions: all the young sector supervisors express a desire for autonomy, freedom to organize their work and their
“rounds” just as they see fit. They work within a large region, which they know well, and are in contact with customers whose concerns they have identified, and which they try to address. Any intervention into their operations by the regional director is viewed negatively, even as a kind of sanction. In any case, the directors have neither the time nor the training to keep a close eye on the supervisors. They leave them a great deal of freedom (autonomy) so long as everything runs smoothly. What might be a “problem” for this organization? Most certainly the loss of a customer, which can easily happen in this very competitive environ- ment, and which translates into a rapid drop in the number of meals served, thereby affecting the regional director’s bonus. A decrease in profitability as well, which has the same effect. So, by reconstructing the triangle of the regional director, the sector supervisor and the customer, we have a good model of how the organization operates: the regional director yields full autonomy to the sector supervisor, according to the latter’s own wishes, so long as the two criteria on which the director is evaluated and paid are not jeopardized. Should this happen, the direc- tor intervenes immediately; to avoid such a scenario and remain autonomous, the sector supervisor almost literally “hangs on to” the customers, attempting to anticipate their needs and satisfy them. This is the classic model of an organization operating within a highly compet- itive market, in which armed peace between the travelling sector super- visors and the sedentary regional director works to the advantage of a customer who holds the key to the relationship: the contract.
The limitations of this mode of functioning are of course easy to iden- tify. It is based entirely on the fact that one of the participants pays the price: the restaurant manager must work out the agreement struck between the sector supervisor and the customer, the conditions of which almost always border on the impossible. From a certain point of view, restaurant managers “pay for” the sector supervisors’ freedom, and whenever the latter complain about being under pressure, whether they know it or not, they actually transfer most of this pressure over to the
restaurant managers. It is thus a system which carries a heavy human cost – this is the cost of the customer’s victory, a point which I intend to get back to later on – a system which every day wastes a great deal of know-how, focused on the short term, much more reactive than proactive.
But let us consider it first and foremost as a reaction to the advantage now held by the customer, a reaction involving constraints, in a sense.
The system is not very sophisticated, implying a physical environment in which work is hard and uncomfortable. But after all, since when does a customer worry about the well-being of a company?