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DMC has always had an implicit customer driven culture - a do whatever-it-takes attitude to deliver to our customers. There are countless examples of over and above effort - working through the night, marathon weeks (or sometimes months) to get a project delivered, hopping on a plane with moment's notice, etc..

As I've written previously, about a year ago, we started a drive to take our company's customer service level from really good to world class. This we discovered is an ongoing process, not just an event. One of the outcomes of the process was to document our Customer Service Fundamentals.

This series of blog posts will explore in detail each of those fundamentals. Our first customer service fundamental:

Always Remember the Importance of the Customer

When I was a boy my father had a framed document above his desk describing who a customer is. There are thousands of versions of this salute to customers, attributed to anyone from Gandhi to Sam Walton. The one statement that has stuck in my mind for decades has been:

A customer is the sole purpose of our work, not an interruption.

All too often, people forget the reason they are at their jobs is because of customers. Sometimes these are internal customers, sometimes external. Many people at their jobs will show outright annoyance when interrupted by a customer who is just looking to get their needs met. From the egregious examples (the store clerk talking on their cell phone while ignoring a paying customer) to the passive (not returning a phone call promptly) we are all both victims and, perhaps at times, perpetrators of this type of behavior.

So, as a company, we took the words from my father's desk (or maybe Gandhi's words) and modified them (slightly) to match our culture. Below is our definition of a customer. We try to live by these words, always remembering the importance of our customers.

A Customer Is...

• A Customer is the most important person in any business.
• A Customer is not dependent upon us. We are dependent upon the customer.
• A Customer does us a favor by doing business with us.
• A Customer is the sole purpose of our work, not an interruption.
• A Customer is a human being with feelings and deserves to be treated with respect.
• Our Customer's success is the key to our success.