Late one afternoon some years ago, we received a telephone call from the freight depot letting us know that a heavy, “rush” package had come in for us. The dispatcher had no driver available to deliver it until the next morning but called because she thought we might want to pick it up ourselves. Sometimes it’s really great to work in a small town.
A young co-worker of mine offered to drive us there, partly because she wanted to show off her new-to-her car. It was a Ford and had just completed its service as a police car. Her father, who helped her obtain the car, had an abiding faith that the heavy-duty suspension and engine installed on such vehicles outweighed the tendency of police cars, especially in small towns, to be “rode hard and put away wet.”
We got into the car, and when she started the engine and drove off, it was like going back in time. The car’s ride and even its sounds were just like the family Ford we had owned 15 years earlier. On the way back from the freight depot, I accepted the offer to drive it myself, and while it handled better, the controls and overall look and feel of the car were very familiar. And that wasn’t a bad thing at all.
These days, Ford is in big trouble. It is losing jaw-dropping amounts of money each day, and the word “survival” comes up frequently in discussions of the company’s future.
Alan Mulally has taken over as CEO of Ford Motor Co., and one of the first things he noticed was that the Ford cars had lost contact with that familiarity, the consistent look and feel that drivers had come to expect from the auto maker.
Technology affects that, of course. It puts distance between the present and the past, and cars today, fortunately, simply do not handle the same way that they did years ago. But Mulally also saw something that bothered him: The Ford models being made today were almost as different from each other as they were from the competition. And that had serious economic consequences.
The lack of a consistent look and feel in Ford vehicles meant higher costs due to fewer shared components. More ominously, from an organizational standpoint, it reflected the fact that the various divisions and departments were hardly communicating with each other, let alone cooperating.
To someone with Mulally’s background, this was all wrong. He had come to Ford from the Boeing Co., with its design-build teams and “family values.” Boeing aircraft were built within a “family” of designs so that while the capabilities of different models varied greatly, the planes shared not only many components but also a look and feel.
The recognizable family characteristics of Boeing aircraft meant savings in production costs, but perhaps even more importantly, it also meant substantial savings for the company’s customers, the airlines. Transition costs to smaller or larger planes in the family were significantly reduced for pilots, cabin attendants, maintenance technicians and even food service and cleanup crews.
If anyone knows the value of a consistent look and feel across product lines, then, it is Mulally. Whether he has the leadership skills and the patience to reverse years of organizational bumbling, and family meddling, at Ford, though, remains to be seen.
Product and service consistency is important for every business, from the largest to the smallest. Yet it is a part of the management picture that we often overlook.
A customer’s experience when contacting and dealing with your business should be consistent. In today’s business environment, for example, the look and feel of your business should be the same whether the contact is personal (as in walk-in), through your Web site, or by telephone, letter or e-mail.
It is not easy to do this, but it is a significant part of the branding that is so necessary for market appeal and customer retention these days. The total customer experience, whether buying a product or a service, should be recognizable, consistent and “you.”
A good first step for many small businesses (and large ones) is to examine the firm’s paperwork and electronic (Web and e-mail) communications. By selecting and standardizing colors, formats, typefaces and even vocabulary, you can give a consistent appearance to your business and improve your ability to stand out in the customer’s mind.
The next steps are to develop a genuine empathy with your customers. Through direct interviews and analysis of your sales data, construct a knowledge of your customers’ needs, preferences and habits that allows you to deliver not just the products and services they need but also a consistent experience. It’s important, these days more than ever.
James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com
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