Every once in a while I come across a company that appears to comply with client desires, yet doesn’t really address them directly. It strikes me as a bad way to interact with customers, but I don’t think it’s always on purpose. Overburdened project managers forget to followup, and the employees who are doing the work are often isolated from the real business motivation. The result: what gets done is not to the client’s expectation, because that expectation isn’t communicated down the line to the people who do the work, and the cycle of discontent continues!

Sometimes, though, the passive-aggressive cycle is baked right into the business itself, because the executives who are running the show are thinking about their customers as revenue sources or cost sinks, not as people with opinions about how they’d like to be treated. If you think of your clients only as an exploitable resource to be fit into a spreadsheet, you’re not doing them any favors, and they’ll eventually get ticked off and leave. You need to actively meet people’s desires and interests, because they’re the ones with the money.

So what triggered this thought?

I was chatting with an acquaintance about Sony’s recent inability to deliver people-pleasing product. Take MP3 players: Sony has the engineering capability, but they also want to protected the music and movie side of their business. Same thing with the PSP; sexy sexy hardware that’s become something of a hacker’s playground, but Sony actively combats the user community with frequent firmware updates. Why spoil the fun of the hacker community? I guess Sony feels the need to protect their own content development agreements with licensed (read: dues paying) partners. Sony builds the hardware as an attraction, and derives revenue from everyone who wants to sell on it. If just anyone on the street can jump on while cutting out the middleman, that’s revenue that isn’t getting taxed by the Sony business machine.

Sony has been doing a lot of things lately to tick off a certain class of consumers. Their digital music players have long been crippled in some fashion, unable to play MP3s or easily transfer music because they want to control the movement of data that might be a revenue stream for them. I don’t think that’s inherently bad: artists should be paid for what they do, for as much money as people want to pay them. However, the ham-handed manner in which Sony polices the revenue stream erodes brand loyalty. There was a time when Sony actually made great gear consistently across the board. Now, you can only count on Sony to deliver at the professional level; their consumer-grade stuff, in my opinion, skates by mostly on the strength of the brand name and some styling. We see some Sony engineering muscle on the important strategic fronts—MP3 players and gaming consoles come to mind—but overall Sony loses my vote of confidence because of their two-faced public image. On the one hand, Sony is capable of delivering really sexy hardware. That’s the positive side of the brand. But with the other hand, Sony enforces Sony Law: you shall not enjoy free use of the device you purchased, you will put up with our intrusive and restrictive licensing, and you are not allowed to resolve the situation for yourself. Ultimately, I feel that Sony doesn’t value me or care about my empowerment; they’re more concerned with protecting their own interests, and charging me for the privilege. Screw that.

Apple, by comparison, continues to deliver advancement in meeting consumer desire. They have managed to extract their revenue stream through partnership, but the difference is that they have chosen the side of the consumer. And as a consumer, you can hold the results in your hand and experience the difference for yourself. That’s not to say that Apple was completely forthcoming in its own technical limitations, but you feel that they’re trying their best for you, and you know that there are passionate people over there doing great things on your behalf. That’s way cooler, and I forgive them their occassional technical transgressions. They’re good people, and they haven’t given me a reason to distrust their motives. Maybe behind the scenes they’re stabbing each other in the back, but I never see that. In general, I see a company that has consistently done the best it could (the 90s being the exception) and is likely to enjoy continued growth. They’ve taken the harder path: meeting the desires and expectations of their consumers. It’s a lot easier to insert “cost saving measures” and “market segmentation” tactics to wring the maximum profit from every transaction. And guess what? As consumers, we smell the rat.

I’ve seen this in small companies too from the contractor perspective. I may meet with the head dude at a company and establish an excellent working rapport. I may even establish a great relationship with the producers and employees. When it comes to talking about money, though, the tendency is to get handed off to the financial guy. His job, strictly, is to ensure that the company spends as little money as possible. It’s not to maintain the strong working relationship that may pay off in terms of future revenue. It’s not to underscore that yes, I have made a valuable contribution to the company and we should continue to work together. This person’s job is to nickel-and-dime me down to the lowest rate, and you know what? That kills the relationship for me. It tells me that whoever is in charge didn’t think to communicate the care with which this negotiation should be handled. It tells me that for all the good things said, I’m just an expense that “needs to be controlled”. It raises the flag that, as much as the person I shook hands with genuinely believes that he is setting the tone of the company, his power only extends to staff in his immediate vicinity at any given moment.

So in summary, there are a few guidelines I would like to follow in the course of running my practice:

• Focus on providing value to the customer as a person, not as a line item on a spreadsheet.

• Make the money by understanding and meeting the desires of the customer consistently, not through defensive fee structures or procedures.

• Ensure that everyone in my organization, no matter what their specific job happens to be, engages the customer in the context of a person. The tendency, all too often, is to see the customer in the context of their job constraints.