The people, stupid

Maybe we have heard someone say “I don’t have customers”; for example, a person who is dedicated to enter orders in a system may think that way and believe that those who have the customers are the ones in the sales team. Nothing could be further from the truth; we all have customers and get paid, and in the end, customers (of all kinds) are people and as Simon Sinek says “Leadership Is About The Heart Count, Not The Head Count”.

In this regard, there are many mantras such “be customer centric”, “the customer experience”, “the customer is king”…. Everything revolves around the customer; and I agree on this, but … what is a customer?

If we are asked what a customer is, we will surely say that a customer “is a person who makes a payment for an object or service” or “is the person who usually enters my business” or a similar definition; and some would even differentiate the customer (the one who pays) from the user (the one who uses what is paid) from the beneficiary (who receives the benefits of what is paid), which in reality may be different people; but in my opinion, all of them are customers in one way or another.

Let me use the word client instead of customer (https://www.channels.app/blog/client-vs-customer) for a better approach, in fact, in some languages customer and client are denoted with the same word.

Instead of looking for the definition of client in a purely economic way, let’s look for the meaning in the etymology of the word client. Client derives from the Latin “Cliens”, which meant protected and in ancient Rome, it was used to refer to those people that wealthy families took into their care to protect and take care of them.

Interesting, isn’t it? So, our client is our protégé. This much broader meaning gives rise to see as clients many people who previously we would not see them as such. Now clients are all those people with whom we interact, and we want them to feel protected and satisfied because we provide them with an object or service, from advice to a document or having cooked dinner.

For example, if we are crossing the street and we see a person with reduced mobility and we decide to help him, we protect him. We may never interact with him again in any way, we may never see him again, but for that instant, the person has been our protégé, our client.

We are also used to the fact that the person who gives the object or service receives a payment from the client, and we think that this payment should be in money; but when we open the concept of client, we also must open the concept of payment, which can take many forms, for example, the gratitude of the person we have helped or the satisfaction of having helped someone.

With these concepts, in our lives we have an infinite number of clients, some of them punctual clients, such as people we meet momentarily and help, and regular clients, such as our friends, family or neighbors. Everyone has clients and the forms of payment can range from money to a kiss or a few words of support in a difficult situation.

My team are also my clients.

When we talk about teams, the leaders are, by definition, the protectors of this relationship, in other words, the team members are their clients and the leaders will have to take care of them, protect them and make them grow.

This does not mean that the team leader will not be at some point a client of one of the team members; if we look at the day to day, surely the team member will have to give a report or a presentation to his leader, at that time, the leader becomes the employee’s client, the employee is giving him something and wants the leader to feel comfortable with the object delivered. The payment in this type of relationship is much more than just money, it is trust, it is loyalty, and it is working at ease with the people around you with what this implies in the results obtained.

With this approach, we can see that relationships are continually taking place in which the roles of “the client” and “the vendor” (the one offering the product or service) are exchanged.

Within the company, it is very important to keep our economic transaction client (those we usually call clients) happy, but also other types of clients such as employees and colleagues; let’s take a closer look.

If we think about the relationship of employees with the company, we can think that the company is the client of the employees, the employees do something and the company pays them for it (classic definition of client), but in this change of roles, the employees are also client of the company, since the company is responsible for taking care of them by giving them security in the future, the possibility of growing, facilitating their tasks, etc, and employees repay the company with loyalty, with pride of belonging, with commitment, etc. We could summarize this relationship by:

Happy employees = happy clients = happy company results.

In the same way that when our economic clients stop paying us or we are not satisfied with the payment or the service we receive, we break the relationship with them, the same happens with employees and colleagues; if trust is broken or if “the payments” are not as expected, we will break the relationship and we will look for another client who wants our product/service and who knows how to appreciate it with payments in line with what we expect. That is why it is also very important to know the degree of satisfaction of all our clients (in general terms); if when we get home our partner does not want to give us a welcome kiss, possibly there has been a transaction between us that has not had a payment or a service with the expected quality (in general terms, again).

For quite some time now, we have tools to have a traceability of the relationships with our commercial clients and to know their degree of satisfaction. Today we can already find solutions for managing the degree of employee satisfaction, even including the satisfaction of the adoption of digital technologies (Digital employee experience) covering important aspects such as:

· Elimination of repetitive tasks

· Collaborative workflows

· Secure workplace

· Data access

· Etc.

While these tools can help at a corporate level to keep track of aspects of the work environment, at a personal level we can always make an analysis of the relationships we maintain with our colleagues and see it by making a simile of the economic client: when we make an economic transaction, we want our client to be satisfied with the product / service to be able to ask for a higher price for what was offered. Likewise, let’s look at how to make our partner or employee satisfied with our interactions, so we can get higher pay, higher appreciation, a bigger smile, more engagement with us and then, the loop will feed back with role reversal (client <-> vendor).

Our employees and colleagues, as well as our clients, are first and foremost people; people who interact with each other by bartering in which both parties are seller and client and all of them expect to have a good experience from the transaction they make, whatever the type of transaction and payment. We have to take care of our business, we have to take care of our clients, we have to take care of our people.

Modifying slightly the phrase that became famous during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign to indicate the importance of the economy, (The economy, stupid) we could say: “The people, stupid”.