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Business results depend upon a single source: customers! Commonly, business leaders fail to understand what drives and motivates customer behavior. Peter Drucker said that what people in a business often think they know about the customer and the market is more likely to be wrong than right. How can you learn what customers want and expect? Ask them.

George Labovitz identified what he calls the "big five"¹ questions that, when answered, provide a clear road map for creating delighted customers:

1. What do our customers care about most?
2. What opportunities do we have to delight them?
3. How well are we satisfying customers right now in terms of what they care about?
4. What are the "best-of-the-best" companies doing to delight their customers?
5. How does the way we operate now make us "difficult to do business with?"

According to Drucker, "The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him. One reason for this is, of course, that nobody pays for a 'product.' What is paid for is satisfactions. But nobody can make or supply satisfactions as such — at best, only the means to attaining them can be sold and delivered."²

Because of the intangible nature of many goods and services, exceptional business leaders frequently look to ways to make customer experience more tangible. For example, Heskett notes that "merely good" businesses design service delivery systems that focus on reliable and timely service delivery. However, market leaders go beyond these to "design service delivery systems that offer customers assurance and tangible evidence of the service in addition to reliability and timely delivery."³ This can be accomplished any number of ways such as leave behinds, guarantees, and others.

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