The Connected Company

Customers have a tendency to resist standardization. The more you try to standardize their service requests, the more you will anger them. Not a good recipe for customer satisfaction or long-term business growth.

McDonald’s is an excellent service provider in their niche, not so much because they are excellent at service delivery, but rather because they have reduced their promise to a very narrow window, reducing variety in their inputs and controlling the environment as much as possible.

Learning is fundamentally different than training. Training is when a company teaches people how to do stuff that the company already knows how to do. Learning is a way to deal with new, uncertain, and ambiguous situations, a process of exploration by which you come to find and discover new things.

The best way to acquire new customers is to engage existing customers.

Connecting your company with customers will require ongoing, continuous feedback between your company and customers. Without that continuous dialogue, it’s inevitable that you will drift apart over time. If you want to stay close to your customers, you will need to become a connected company.

What made customers happy a few years ago won’t necessarily make them happy today. In other words, if you’re not learning and evolving, you’re falling behind.

Service quality is the difference between that purpose (what customers expect) and your performance (what they get).

Learning is making progress toward a goal, so people need to know what they are shooting for.

This works for McDonald’s because they have narrowed customer expectations to match a factory-like service.