Relationships Part 1 - Trust and Responsibility
This is the first article in a series on relationships. I decided to write on relationships due to recent work-related examples that I just went through, and I truly believe relationship management is an essential part of leadership. It's all about Keeping the Customer Happy...
Trust and Responsibility
I was amazed when I read Seth Godin's article about the Dabbawalla. They are delivery people who deliver thousands of lunches daily - barefoot - in Mumbai, India.
They are so accurate that the reported error rate is 1 per 6 million deliveries.
They never even miss a delivery during the worst weather (monsoon season)!
How is this possible? How do you create and run a service with thousands of employees, no technology and a poorly-educated workforce and have better than six sigma quality?
Here's why, according to Seth:
Simple: the dabbawallas know their customers. If they rotated the people around, it would never work. There’s trust, and along with the trust is responsibility. By creating a flat organization and building relationships, the system even survives monsoon season.Can we learn from the Dabbawalla phenomenon? We better.. But here are other questions around this topic of building relationships:
- Do you know your customer well and their needs?
- Do you know HOW your customer wants to be dealt with? their style, their pet peeves ?
- Do we invest in our customer-facing individuals, to invest in the relationships?
- Would retention of customer-facing individuals affect our quality, relationships, success?