Customer focused operations

A customer-focused business gives employees flexibility, and allow them to take risks to help push their performance above average. They are entirely focused on understanding potential customers, and hire and train employees to deliver the best customer service.

In contrast, ‘Operations-focused’ companies (as the name implies) focus on operations. They place more emphasis on processes that affect the running of the business like budget, manufacturing, distribution, etc. Their strict adherence to the rules limits flexibility in the working and decision making of their employees.

Although both kinds of companies have the same processes, their approach to business decisions differs substantially.

A customer-focused business empowers employees to make decisions that are for the benefit of the customer. Customer satisfaction is their number one priority; they allow employees to bend the rules – as long as it isn’t illegal, ethically wrong nor harms the company’s reputation – in taking care of the customer. They have guidelines instead of rules and encourage employees to think outside the box and take risks. Moreover, they even allow employees to spend dollars on keeping a customer happy (but in an amount which does not give the company any loss).

In contrast, employees in operations-focused companies always require the manager’s permission to pursue anything stretching out of their policies and the way of normally doing things.