客户至上
By Michael Ballé and Nicolas Chartier
迈克尔·巴莱和尼古拉斯·查蒂耶
1
At Aramis Group, which we launched in 2001 with a phone and a laptop, we vividly remember our first customer even today.
在2001年，我们用一部电话和一台笔记本电脑创办了Aramis Group，我们至今仍清晰地记得我们的第一位客户。
That’s because every sale is an adventure when you’re a startup.
这是因为当你是一家初创企业时，每一笔交易都是一场冒险。
You desperately need to secure each potential transaction that comes your way.
你迫切需要确保每一笔潜在的交易成功。
So, every customer is someone you are determined to satisfy because their unique experience may make the difference between success and failure.
因此，每一位客户都是你决心去满足的人，因为他们独特的体验，可能决定了交易成功或失败。
But when early success now accounts for thousands of annual car sales, you face the challenge of managing a process.
然而，当早期的成功转变为现在的每年数千辆汽车的销售时，你面临的是流程管理的挑战。
You lose your unique touch with each customer, finding that you can’t satisfy everyone and that every customer, like Tolstoy’s unhappy family, is
unreasonable in their own way.
你失去了与每位客户的独特联系，发现自己无法让每个人都满意，每位客户就像托尔斯泰（Tolstoy）所说的一样，不幸家庭各有各的不幸。
Consequently, what was once a vocation for many of our sales team members has become a job, a step toward something better.
因此，曾经对我们许多销售团队成员来说是一种使命的工作，变成了向更好发展的一个阶段而已。
We were particularly challenged when it came to scaling the good feeling resulting from any personal transaction.
当我们尝试将个人的交易所带来的良好体验进行规模化时，面临了特别大的挑战。
When we started, we might meet each customer once or twice, particularly if all went well.
刚开始时，如果一切顺利的话，我们可能会与每位客户见上一两次面。
But as we began to see up to ten customers daily, our organizational needs diverged from a strong focus on each transaction (which we assumed looked alike).
但随着每天接待的客户数量增加到十位左右，我们的组织需求开始偏离了对每次交易的高度关注（我们以为每次交易都差不多）。
As a result, while our customers were making one of the largest purchases of their life, our system for satisfying them increasingly failed to put the customer first.
结果，在我们的客户做出人生中最大消费中的一次时，我们的系统却越来越无法将客户放在首位来满足他们的需求。
...we worked to mitigate all pain points in the purchasing process.
我们致力于减少购买流程中的所有痛点
Our initial strategy was to do everything possible to make it easier for customers to buy what they wanted.
我们最初的策略是尽一切可能让客户更容易购买到他们想要的东西。
We didn’t want merely to sell cars — we felt that buying a car should be fun. So we worked to mitigate all pain points in the purchasing process.
我们不想仅仅是卖车，我们认为买车应该是一件有趣的事情。因此，我们致力于减轻购买过程中的所有痛点。
Since no one likes to haggle with an experienced car salesperson, we eliminated bargaining by setting a fixed price on the site.
由于没有人喜欢与经验丰富的汽车销售员讨价还价，我们在网站上设定了固定价格，从而消除了议价环节。
Because it’s a pain to travel from one brand dealership to the next, we created an infinite store on our website.
此外，客户在不同品牌的经销商之间来回奔波很麻烦，我们在网站上创建了一个无限商店，让客户可以方便地浏览和比较不同品牌的汽车。
Despite all these countermeasures to emerging problems, we continued to battle the universal challenge of “big company disease”: Bureaucracy crept in and
required more resources and attention than individual customers.
尽管我们采取了这些应对新问题的措施，我们仍然在与“大公司病”特有的挑战作斗争：官僚主义逐渐渗透，耗费了比关注每个客户更多的资源和精力。
We struggled, for example, to give our sales staff breathing room from the transactional work demanded by our systems, enabling them to focus on every client’s
unique personal needs.
例如，我们努力让销售人员从系统要求的事务性工作中解脱出来，让他们能够专注于每位客户独特的个人需求。
2
Our first countermeasure for the bloat of rapid growth was to steer attention to the right things by measuring essential items
我们应对快速增长所带来臃肿问题的第一个对策，是通过衡量关键事项，来引导将注意力集中在正确的事情上
Our first countermeasure for the bloat of rapid growth was to steer attention to the right things by measuring essential items.
我们应对快速增长所带来的臃肿问题的第一个对策，是通过衡量关键事项，来引导将注意力集中在正确的事情上。
We put customer satisfaction proxies such as the Net Promoter Score or the Google grade at the top of our scorecards.
我们将客户满意度的指标，例如净推荐值（Net Promoter Score）或谷歌（Google）评论，放在评分卡的首位。
That helped, yet we still found many occasions when we walked the gemba where we could have approached customers better.
这确实有所帮助，但我们在走访现场时仍然发现，许多情况下本可以更好地服务客户。
We would hear sales staff refusing to give people exactly what they wanted, saying, “that’s just how the system works.”
我们会听到销售人员拒绝给客户提供他们确切想要的东西，并说：“这就是系统的运作方式。”
Moreover, we found ourselves dealing with daily snafus and mishandled calls. We told ourselves that not everyone can always be pleased and that a percentage of cheesed-off customers is a typical cost of business.
此外，我们还发现自己每天都在处理各种突发状况和处理不当的来电。我们告诉自己，不可能总是让每个人都满意，部分不满的客户是经营中的正常成本。
Of course, there is no ‘normal cost’ of doing business; there is only value or waste.
当然，经营中并不存在“正常成本”，只有价值或浪费。
And from our customer’s perspective, we were providing waste in the form of money, time, and inconvenience.
而从客户的角度来看，我们是在以金钱、时间和不便的形式制造浪费。
So, as we slowly came to face this situation, our problem statement became, “How do we treat every customer as our first customer (her name was Mrs. Paunet)?”
因此，当我们逐渐面对这一情况时，我们的问题陈述变成了：“我们如何才能像对待我们的第一位客户（她的名字是Paunet）那样对待每一位客户？”
原文链接：
https://www.lean.org/the-lean-post/Putting Customers First - Lean Enterprise Institute
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