I’ve often been asked about the value of external evaluation programs, especially in the world of customer service and sales. I believe there’s no better way to truly understand your customer’s experience than to pretend to be one. There are many reasons why, so let me share them in the following story.

Back in the early ’90s, I was working for a communications company and we had recently spent a lot of money trying to improve our perception of customer service. As you know, communications (phone) companies were notoriously lacking in these skills, especially in the previous decade. The majority of the money and energy was spent on a customer tracking or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. At the time, it seemed like the panacea for all of our customer service ills, but of course it was not.

The system came with a lot of bells and whistles and promised to finally integrate all of our existing systems while also managing the customer experience from beginning to end. While it did that from a technology standpoint, we didn’t account for the human factor. The greatest customer relationship software in the world is useless unless everyone using it understands the way it works ...