Executive Summary

We Have Met The Customers, And They Are Us

Carl R. Bergquist
Chairman & CEO of Bergquist Company

April 1993

The problem most of us have with the customers is that they are remote; they are not real. Their wishes and needs are filtered to us through layers of people and via documents and computers that tend to make them an illusion, a name with no face.

But, nonetheless, customers are real: they pay their bills; they feeds us; they cause us to grow by sustaining us with work. How could we even think of giving them less than our best. But we do. We must understand that we will not exist as a business unless we learn to serve our customers in a way that earns their repeat business. I say repeat business because 75 percent of our growth comes from current customers. If we don't service them, we won't grow.

Sometimes our customers are closer than we think. Our customers can be the group in our company that we send our own work to. I hope that group would set a standard higher than our customers require.

Everything we do, we do as a team, and we are only as good as any member of that team. We earn our rewards from our customers by the performance of our team. We can only earn more money and secure better jobs if the customers perceive us to offer more value than our competitors. Our salespeople try to sell that value. They try to convince our customers that we offer a higher value than our competition, but if the team does not perform, then it becomes just another sales pitch. We lose our credibility--and our customers.

You have heard time and time again that the customer is always right; that is dead wrong. The customer is not always right. Many times they are wrong. But we must react as though they are right. If they forget to order, we hop to it and get them their parts--if they reject a good part, we, in a kind way, tell them that they might want to recheck that part.

There are some customers that we just do not want as customers. I have had customers who have asked for kickbacks (they are not our customers now). I have had customers who have askedme to defraud suppliers and claim good parts as rejects (and they are no longer our customers).

If any customer asks you to do something that you question from a moral standpoint, you should immediately present the problem to your supervisor. But know, that at the top in your company, we will support no customer who asks you to operate in a way that conflicts with our moral principles. You can count on it, we will stand behind you. The customer goes; you stay.

I leave you with a sobering fact: the products we make can and do mean the difference between life and death. Our human resources director's son, Jeff, was recently in a near fatal motorcycle accident. The IVAC devices that kept him alive were controlled by switches made in our shop. So Jeff was the end customer for those switches. He is alive today thanks in part to your good work. Some day, it could be one of your children--or it could even be you. Now, doesn't that make the customer a bit more real?

Excerpted from the Bergquist Company's "A Supervisor's Plumbline."

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