{"id":90068,"date":"2026-09-22T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/?p=90068"},"modified":"2026-10-10T15:22:18","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T19:22:18","slug":"company-customer-also-psa-for-kit-users","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/company-customer-also-psa-for-kit-users\/","title":{"rendered":"Company > Customer (also PSA for KIT users)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When the company becomes more important than the customer<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t find \u201cwe\u2019re customer-centric\u201d very convincing. I want to know what happens when serving a customer gets in the way of hitting a target. That\u2019s where I would look for the truth about a business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imagine you run a support team. You want customers to spend less time on the phone, so you start measuring call length. That sounds reasonable. Then you reward shorter calls. A representative who fixes a difficult problem in twelve minutes looks worse than one who ends an unresolved call in four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second customer calls back tomorrow. Your team handles another short call. On the report, people work faster. In the customer\u2019s life, you\u2019ve made the problem more annoying. Nobody had to announce that customers no longer matter. You changed what counted as success, and the people doing the work responded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the failure I\u2019m interested in: a company starts protecting its internal version of success at the expense of the reason people choose it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think this explains every struggling business. But Nike\u2019s channel decisions, Starbucks\u2019 operating trade-offs and IBM\u2019s internal divisions give us concrete reasons to take the pattern seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason people pay you<\/strong>
When I ask why a company exists, I\u2019m not asking for the founder\u2019s biography or the sentence above the fold. I\u2019m asking what becomes possible for someone because the business exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n

\n \n
\n \n

Subscribe to keep reading<\/h2>\n \n \n

\n Become a paid subscriber to get access to the rest of this post and other exclusive content.\n <\/p>\n \n \n

\n \n
\n Subscribe<\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n \n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the company becomes more important than the customer I don\u2019t find \u201cwe\u2019re customer-centric\u201d very convincing. I want to know what happens when serving a customer gets in the way of hitting a target. That\u2019s where I would look for the truth about a business. Imagine you run a support team. You want customers to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"paid_subscribers","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":true,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","rank_math_canonical_url":"","rank_math_focus_keyword":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digest-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7CVvN-nqI","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90068"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90220,"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90068\/revisions\/90220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulsyng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}