In the early days of data warehousing, I was invited to talk to a CEO and a CIO at a well-known company. The person inviting me to this meeting asked me to not make a technical presentation. So I carefully prepared a non-technical strategic presentation for these high-level officers of the company.

I concentrated on three things: improving the revenue of the company, improving the market share of the company and reducing expenses. I was given half an hour to speak to these people.

I made my presentation. I described how looking at the larger, consolidated picture of the corporation led to important insights. I described how consolidating application data into a data warehouse could lead to important decisions for the corporation.

At the end of my conversation, the CEO thanked me for my time and said, “We just aren’t interested in those things as a corporation. We have other interests.”

I came home and asked my wife if we had any stock in that corporation, because if we did, we needed to sell it immediately.

Fast forward to today.

The company that said they weren’t interested in improving revenue, improving market share and reducing expenses is no longer in business. It has taken the company about 20 years to die, but they are now officially dead. Chapter 11.

There was another retailer in the Midwest that I had a similar experience with. I did not speak to the CEO, but I spoke to other high-level officers of the company. They, too, were distracted and weren’t interested in hearing what their customers were saying. The opportunity to improve revenue, expand their customer base, or reduce expenses was not important to them.

Today, this company too is dying. Every day, the Wall Street Journal discloses that another branch of the company has been sold off. Soon, there will be nothing left.

The first company mentioned was JCPenney Catalogue sales and the second company mentioned here is Sears Roebuck and Company.

What is so hard about getting the message – the number one thing that successful companies do is to listen to their customer. The number one thing that failing companies do is NOT listen to their customers. Why are people put in the position of responsibility who don’t understand this very basic message? Don’t they teach that in Harvard Business School? What in the world could be going on in the head of a manager who is NOT interested in hearing the voice of the customer?

In terms of priorities, listening to the voice of your customer needs to be the ETERNAL number one item on what is important to the corporation. The need to listen to your customer is FOREVER the most important thing a corporation can do. What is so difficult about this message? Why do so many top-level managers just not get this message? It is – after all – a really simple and intuitive message.

Perhaps the reason that management doesn’t want to listen to their customer is because the voice of the customer says strategic things and management is consumed with immediate day-to-day activities. It is easy to focus on this quarter’s revenues and this quarter’s items sold. It is not so easy to hear what the customer might be saying right now.

Or perhaps the voice of the customer is heard just one voice at a time, not in concert with other customers. It is easy to dismiss a single customer. What one person is saying is just the opinion of one person. Hearing the concert of lots of customers is much more difficult than hearing a single customer.

But if you don’t listen to the voice of the customer on an ongoing basis, you will eventually hear the voice of the customer as the customer votes with their feet and starts to do business with the competition. And by this time, your company is in trouble. Once those customers go, they are not going to be coming back.

So, listening to the voice of the customer is a gradual thing. If you ignore the customer today, there will be only a marginal, almost imperceptible shift in the loss of business. You will hardly notice it. But if you ignore the customer long enough, you wake up one day, and there are no more customers to ignore. You are out of business.