Customer Focus and Employee Focus

(All images Imagen 3)

When you market to your prospects and customers, will they believe what you say? Or will you be exposed as a liar?

The Bredemarket blog has talked incessantly about customer focus from a marketing perspective, noting that an entity’s marketing materials need to speak to the needs of the customer or the prospect, not the selling entity.

But customer focus alone is not enough. When the customers sign up, they have to deal with someone.

Unless the customer is stuck in answer bot hell (another issue entirely), they will deal with an employee.

The expendables 

And some employees are not happy, because they feel they are expendable.

Steve Craig of PEAK IDV recently shared a long quote from J.P. Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon. Here’s a short excerpt:

“Every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient. If I was running a department with a hundred people, I guarantee you, if I wanted to, I couldn’t run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you, I could do it.”

So J.P. Morgan Chase is doing very well, Dimon is doing very well, but he’s implicitly saying that his people suck.

Another CEO, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, is more explicit about how much his people suck.

“This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams. I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low performers faster.”

You may have noticed my intentional use of the word “entity” at the beginning of this post. Because while businesses have attracted much attention in the current culture of “layoffs will continue until morale improves,” these businesses are themselves “low performers” in the shedding people category. Chief DOGE Elon Musk, fresh from reducing X’s headcount, is coordinating layoffs in the public sector.

“Federal agencies were ordered by Donald Trump to fire mostly probationary staff, with as many as 200,000 workers set to be affected and some made to rush off the premises.”

Zuckerberg could only dream of saying “you’re fired” to 200,000 people. That dream would certainly increase his masculine energy, but for now Musk has trumped Zuckerberg on that front.

• Do J.P. Morgan Chase’s employees matter to Jamie Dimon?
• Do Meta’s employees matter to Mark Zuckerberg?
• Do federal employees matter to Elon Musk and Donald Trump?

Regardless of the answer (and one could assert that they like the “good” employees and don’t want them to be harmed by the bad apples), their views are not universal.

The other extreme

Richard Branson (reportedly) does not put his needs first at the Virgin companies he runs.

Nor does he prioritize investors.

Oh, and if you’re one of Virgin’s customers…your happiness isn’t critically important either.

Branson’s stance is famous, and (literally) sounds foreign to the Dimons and Zuckerbergs of the world.

“So, my philosophy has always been, if you can put staff first, your customer second and shareholders third, effectively, in the end, the shareholders do well, the customers do better, and yourself are happy.”

You could argue that this is a means to an end, and that employee focus CAUSES customer focus. What if employee focus is missing?

“If the person who’s working for your company is not given the right tools, is not looked after, is not appreciated, they’re not gonna do things with a smile and therefore the customer will be treated in a way where often they won’t want to come back for more.”

Think about this the next time you have a problem with your Facebook account or at a Chase Bank or with your tax return.

Whether back office issues matter to customers

Of course I may be over reading into this, because I have said that the customer doesn’t care about your company. If you solve their problems, they don’t care if you’re hiring 200,000 people or firing 200,000 people.

If you solve their problems.

I can’t cite the source or the company, but I heard a horror story about an unhappy customer. The company had heavily bought into the “layoffs will continue until morale improves” philosophy, resulting in turnover in the employees who dealt with customers. When the customer raised an issue with the company, it made a point of saying that employee John Jones (not the employee’s real name) could have solved the customer’s problem long ago if the company hadn’t removed Jones from the account.

What about your company’s marketing?

So think about this in your marketing. Before you brag about your best places to work award, make sure that your prospect will see evidence of this in the employees they encounter.

“Our 8th annual LinkedIn Top Companies list highlights the 50 best large workplaces to grow your career in the U.S. right now. Fueled by unique LinkedIn data, the methodology analyzes various facets of career progression like promotion rates, skill development and more among employees at each company.”

Number 1 on LinkedIn’s April 2024 list? J.P. Morgan Chase.

Number 2? Amazon.

Number 6? UnitedHealth Group.

Um, maybe not.

In the meantime, take care of yourself, and each other.