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As passengers settled in for a recent flight on JetBlue Airways Corp. (www.jetblue.com), the voice on the loudspeaker introduced itself as belonging to the company’s chief executive, David Neeleman. Neeleman surprised passengers by saying that he, personally, would be coming through the cabin to serve snacks and drinks. For Neeleman, greeting passengers on flights has become as habitual as the upstart airline’s signature blue potato chips and blue leather seats have become for regular JetBlue fliers. Neeleman joins the flight crew at least two times a week to serve food and chat with passengers about what the airline is doing right or wrong. “The flight attendants call me ‘snack boy,’” Neeleman says. In an age when many companies talk about the importance of getting to know their customers better, some top executives are taking to the idea literally. They are going out and dealing directly with customers, both to sensitize themselves about what customers really care about and to see what front-line employees deal with on a daily basis. “These folks are trying to get much closer to real customers than a survey can,” says Martha Rogers, a founding partner of Peppers and Rogers Group (www.1to1.com), a consulting practice that helps companies build collaborative relationships with individual customers. “I applaud them for it.” Getting an immediate sense of what makes individual customers tick is far better than getting a composite view from a survey that is already six months out of date before it is completed, Rogers says. Emmanuel Sodbinow, an analyst at Patricia Seybold Group Inc. (www.psgroup.com), a consulting firm specializing in customer strategies, says he thinks more senior executives need to get out of the office and meet customers on their own terms. Sodbinow laments that “the culture of making sure you’re going to focus on customers every way you can has lost its currency.” JetBlue’s Neeleman, who launched his hip yet frugal—and, so far, profitable—airline in early 2000, is clearly a believer in rubbing elbows with customers. He has served passengers on more than 100 flights already. In addition to building goodwill among his fledgling customer base, Neeleman says he has, among other things, been using the conversations to help figure out how to structure the company’s frequent-flier program, which is scheduled for introduction this year. At CoServ, an energy and telecom utility (www.coserv.com), CEO Bill McGinnis finds himself talking to customers every day. McGinnis’s longstanding policy of answering his own phone makes it impossible for him to avoid contact. Besides, when a customer demands to speak to “the head guy,” service representatives are instructed to patch the call through to McGinnis. Often, the person on the other end of the line is a residential customer trying to get service started or calling about a missed payment. Many of them start the conversation by saying “I guess you know I haven’t paid my bill this month.” (Of course, he doesn’t know.) Even though the calls may bog him down in mundane details, McGinnis says that “I think it’s a major thing to be able to maintain that customer contact.” McGinnis, who has been with the company for 21 years, once knew where each tree had fallen onto a power line during a storm and answered outage calls himself. Now as the company grows, he finds himself losing touch with some details of the business. McGinnis says he now “may be the worst one in the building” to field customer queries. But once he gets the information he needs to answer a question, he insists on calling the customer back himself because he gets to “look like a hero.” Gateway Inc. (www.gateway.com) founder Ted Waitt is legendary at the company for his interactions with customers. For instance, on a tour of Gateway retail outlets, Waitt once approached an unhappy customer at a Gateway Country Store in Carle Place, N.Y. The customer was waiting at the service desk to arrange for the repair of his printer, and he was clearly upset that he needed the repair at all. Waitt struck up a conversation with the customer about digital photography, leading him over to the sales floor as they spoke. Within minutes, Waitt had not only placated the customer but had also succeeded in selling him photo software and digital photography training. For Waitt, the visits serve as a way of motivating employees as much as connecting with customers. “You haven’t seen selling until you’ve seen Ted,” an employee at the Carle Place store said after watching Waitt. “What an inspiration.” Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney Channel (www.disneychannel.com), has mingled with the masses at Disneyland, dressed up as a character from a Disney Channel afternoon cable-TV program. Donning a Disney costume is something all top Disney executives do when they take part in an extensive executive orientation program called Disney Dimensions. Despite the sweltering heat inside the heavy costume and the fact that “of course you can’t speak” when you are dressed as a character, she called the learning experience “unbelievable.” While Sweeney had once viewed Walt Disney Co. (www.disney.com) as “a massive corporation,” the experience of having kids swarm all around her opened her eyes to the importance of creating good characters and stories and the impact they have on Disney’s brand. She says that direct contact with consumers is the best way to figure out what’s missing in Disney Channel programs. “You need a lot of different things” to stay in touch, she says. “Having the ability to dress up as a character was a piece of it. It all boils down to listening.”
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