Customer Chair

It is a creed of our time: More customer orientation means more success. Only those who think about the company and the product from the customer’s point of view can survive in the long term. A #workhack by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos can help. Because Amazon is not only considered customer-oriented, but also obsessed with its customers.

To permanently remind everyone at Amazon of the customer focus, Bezos recently introduced a special symbol: The customer chair. In internal meetings, one chair is always left empty at the conference table, reserved for the most important person in the room: the customer. It is a kind of filter. All decisions made at an internal meeting are to be compared with the needs of Amazon’s customers at all times.

When participants see the chair in meetings, it means: let’s focus our discussion on our customer.

• What would our customer say now if they were seated at the table?
• Is our discussion relevant to them?
• What is their perspective, how would they find this idea?
• Would they have any real benefit from our idea?

Other companies have developed the Amazon idea further by, for example, producing strikingly designed customer chairs and placing one in each meeting room.

Another good variation is to designate a colleague to sit in the chair at each meeting, actively taking on the role of the customer and commenting on the questions posed above. This variant is recommended if you are concerned that the empty customer chair is being overlooked and becoming ineffective.

Audible signals (i.e. ringing bells) are another way to make the customer’s point of view heard. Ringing the bell when a team member has a contribution from the customer’s point of view can be helpful. If the bell remains silent, it is rung, at the very latest, at the end of the meeting in order to look at the meeting from the customer’s point of view – in the hope that the bell will be used earlier at the next meeting.