Working Hard at Listening
One of the hardest things to do is to listen. Most of us are wired to talk and do it quite well. We are quick to offer our ideas, our solutions, our way to do this or that. Although God blessed us with two ears and we hear just fine, most of us really struggle to listen. And by “listen” we mean to take the time to hear and really understand the ideas and concerns of others. It turns out that organizations are no different than people, which should come as no surprise since organizations are nothing more than a group of people with a common purpose. To be successful in today’s hyper-competitive world we must really understand how well we serve our customers. We would like to know what we do right and what we do wrong; what challenges our customers face and how we might better help our customers overcome these challenges.
At CPC we really get the importance of listening. We work hard to listen to our customers, suppliers and team members. We collect data throughout the year from our customers, like performance reports, quality reports, and other types of formal feedback. Through our quality system we collect all kinds of data on our performance…acceptance rates, on-time delivery rates, in-house rework rates, and on and on. We have even created a mechanism to log issues that our customers report that might not be captured in our quality metrics, like emailed complaints or suggestions. We measures our customers’ perception of how we are performing. Statistics are statics but perception is reality…and we really mean this. How our customers perceive we are performing is how we are performing.