“Thanks for sharing your experience with us . . .”
One of my first experiences with the financial guru’s occurred in the mid 1980’s when I was a new junior marketing manager working for a major consumer products company. An irate consumer was transferred to my phone by a telephone operator who couldn’t find anyone in customer service to take a call. The frustrated woman told me she had returned a product 8 weeks ago and couldn’t get a phone call or letter returned.
After doing some internal investigating I found out responsibility for responding to consumer letters and phone calls had been transferred from sales to administration (finance). The controller let go all but one of the employees. That employee was out on disability so letters and inquiries had been going unanswered for two months. I personally went to talk to the controller who informed me he perceived it to be a waste of money to respond to unhappy consumers. They should be addressing their problems with the stores where the products were distributed and not with the manufacturer. In fact, he was planning to eliminate the department in the new year when the employee returned.
Years late I became president of that division. I immediately recreated the consumer services function and properly staffed it. In addition we installed a database that allowed us to capture both problems and suggestions from consumers. That information helped us make some needed improvements to our products as well as identify ideas for new products. Plus I instructed the staff to make the customer happy, refund the money or replace the product even when the customer was wrong. As a former marketing manager I knew that word of mouth advertising was more powerful than any television commercial. Within three years we had the top performing division in the corporation. Why? We treated our customers with love, we beefed up product development and began to lead our industry in innovation, and we killed the finance directed cost reduction programs and instructed manufacturing to focus on zero defects instead of making the product cheaper.
Financial people do not create wealth, they destroy it because they do not understand the essence of a commercial transaction. Companies invent, manufacture and distribute products. Customers buy those products. Running a business is not about cutting expenses, dressing up a balance sheet, or cutting quality to lower cost. Running a business is about making great products people want to buy and delivering them to the customer at the appropriate value (notice I said value, not price). Finance people focus on price and cost, not value.
Soooooooo, what happened to the controller?