It's the Customer, Stupid!: 34 Wake-up Calls to Help You Stay Client-Focused

Chapter 4. Always Give Them a Baker's Dozen

Great customer service is about great listening skills.

GEO Prism's Mayday

Back in the mid-eighties, I had the pleasure of doing a series of speeches for a company called New United Motors (NUMMI), a cross between Toyota and Chevrolet. The two companies came together to produce an automobile they called the Geo Prism. The most pioneering aspect of this partnership is that Geo was built under a Japanese (Toyota) management system with an American (Chevrolet) workforce. Though this looked on the surface like a potentially ill-fated combination, it actually became the key to their success.

NUMMI did a very novel thing: They gathered salespeople from all over the world into their plant in Freemont, California, and showed them how they were going to build this new automobile. In fact, there were so many salespeople that they could not get them all into the building where I was speaking at one time. I had to give the same speech four different times that day to accommodate the sales force.

Throughout the course of the day, I kept hearing some Japanese music ringing out arbitrarily from what sounded like different sections in the plant. At the end of the day, I asked the plant manager what the music represented.

"That was our 'mayday' you heard," he explained. "The music identifies exactly where in the plant we were experiencing a problem. Everyone in that area drops what they are doing and they go and solve the problem."

That is pretty ingenious thinking, ...