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:

1. Do you know your customer well and their needs?
   
2. Do you know HOW your customer wants to be dealt with? their style, their pet peeves ?
   
3. Do we invest in our customer-facing individuals, to invest in the relationships?
4. Would retention of customer-facing individuals affect our quality, relationships, success?
   

Thoughts?