What is the Corporate Golden Rule?

What is the Corporate Golden Rule? "Treat your customers as if you were one of them".

Of course, it is the rare corporation that is consistently exhibiting this behavior.

As an operations and marketing executive, I've been working with and for major corporations for the past ten years of my career. Through this experience, it has become evident to me that it is financially possible (and often financially beneficial) for every single corporation to give most, if not all, of their customers excellent treatment.....and take a completely customer-centric point of view.

In addition, it has been a rare co-worker or manager who did not agree that that was the way things "ought to be". After all, we are all consumers of goods from corporations.

So what gives? If it is that simple, why are almost all companies on the planet failing to fulfill the golden rule?

I'm not sure that anyone has a clear answer to that question. However, I suspect that it is the structure of corporations itself that are to blame, not the employees.

In the end, no one is really in charge of a corporation. Between employees, stockholders and customers....there is war for attention going on. Everyone is struggling to manage investor expectations, manage upwards, manage downwards, keep costs in check, create top-line growth, offshore, outsource, etc.

All the madness leads to a collective corporate attention deficit disorder....and the end customer is often left out in the cold. They become "invisible" to everyone except the call center.

The goal of this blog is not to criticize corporations as evil, their management teams as evil, their bankers as evil, or even capitalism as evil. On the contrary, it is my strong belief that most folks in business have the best of intentions, they just lack the ammunition to cut through the distractions.

This blog aims to point out specific instances where corporations are mistreating their customers, and to suggest a potential solution that they could deploy to improve the situation.

Trust me on this, if enough of us voice our opinions and give support toward a specific improvement, someone at a given corporation will notice. Then they will have the proof they need to cut through the clutter and improve the customer experience.

And each time we enable a corporate employee to cut through the clutter, we collectively take a step forward toward making the "Golden Rule" applicable in the world of corporate/consumer relations.

I think it is worth a shot. Do you?