#Customer Chair

Internal service departments like accounting, HR, IT, or controlling aren’t always used to including the customer in their considerations. And yet, every task has a customer. In accounting, it might be the invoice recipients, in HR and IT, the employees, and in controlling, perhaps the board of directors. And certainly, some customers may have conflicting requirements: the invoice recipient might want something different from procurement, and the employees might have different needs than the board. It’s incredibly helpful to give both parties a persona, and thus a voice, and let them engage in a discussion. This brings implicit chains of reasoning, which everyone usually keeps to themselves, to the surface, making them open for discussion and negotiation.

Don’t we all suffer from too much bureaucracy? We’re great at constantly creating new rules to close gaps, but not so great at clearing out and getting rid of old ones. Yet, doing so is incredibly refreshing and helps regain clarity. With the Customer Chair, you might stumble upon rules and regulations that don’t benefit the customer, and sometimes you’ll even find ones that benefit no one at all. When that happens, you shouldn’t hesitate to get rid of them.

In the Customer Chair, a seat is reserved in meetings for the customer, which is occupied by a team member who adopts the customer’s perspective. The Customer Chair serves as a practical reminder: let’s not forget the customer’s perspective in our discussion. This naturally leads to questions like: What would our customer say if they were sitting at the table with us? Is our discussion relevant to them? What’s their perspective, and how would they view this idea? Would they truly benefit from our idea?