One Throat to Choke

One Throat to Choke

I climb up on my soapbox today with a slightly different outlook and thoughts about productivity.  Coming into work today I was locked out of my building.  Not because I forgot my keys or my card key, but because it's Daylight Savings Time and the folks who manage our building did not program the card reader for Daylight Savings Time.  Now, this is not the first problem we've had with our building management firm, but it led me to think about working productively with others.

The biggest challenge to working with our building management firm, and with many other firms, is that there is not "One throat to choke".  This is another colorful phrase I picked up from my time in sales.  What it means is that the customer doesn't really care if there are several groups or business functions involved in providing a solution, as long as the customer gets to interact and beat up on one person who owns the problem of making the customer happy.

Our building management firm has one person responsible for security and grounds, one for janitorial, one for HVAC and so forth.  There is no multi-disciplinary account manager we can work with.  While this organization may be great for the building management firm, it stinks when we work with it, since there is no one overriding person worried about making us happy.

I don't think these guys are an isolated case.  Many businesses I work with are not organized to work successfully and productively with customers.  A good case in point is my bank.  There's a person responsible for checking, a person responsible for savings, a person responsible for investments and a different person responsible to work with me if I want loans.  No one person in that bank understands my value as a customer and the way they are organized gets in the way of doing business with them. In fact, sometimes their organization gets in the way of working with me, since the folks who managed my established accounts (like checking or investments) are worried that the folks who are trying to sell me new services (like an equity loan) will screw up the relationship.

What I want from organizations that I work with is one throat to choke.  I want them to organize in a way that treats my needs and requirements as a customer as paramount.  I frankly don't care how they are organized internally or what the bureaucracy or politics looks like.  What I want is one face to the customer and one person who owns my problems.  The challenge is that many firms look at an account management position such as this as "overhead".  What it provides to the customer is faster response, and the security in the knowledge that someone is working to represent your needs and interests.  This helps me work more quickly and efficiently, and hopefully get answers faster.

I've asked you to staple yourself to an order to see how your internal processes work.  How about the choke-ability of your firm?  What would your external customers say its like working with your firm?  How about internally?  Is it easy to find and share information across business units or functions?  Do people understand that "that's not my area or not my job" is not an acceptable answer?