Building Your Own Tower of Babel

Is your business building your own Tower of Babel, a crowning monument to your achievement? Turning inward from serving your customer, talking and praising only your own efforts, first as a company, then as a department, then as an individual?

Pretty soon....IT speaks only its language; Customer Service theirs; Finance has their own dialect; and sales, come on now, too often they're on their own planet (God bless 'em; where would we be without 'em, but still). And then management is off in their world, too. Each lays claim to their language being the language of success.

The language not spoken is the language of the customer.

What does the customer want?

What need of theirs do we solve?

How will we solve it?

What will it cost?

Is anyone else doing it?

Speak the language of the customer. Save the bricks and mortar from your Tower of Babel; use them for something useful, instead.

Update: Just after I posted this blog, I found Charles Heflin's tweet about his blog post, Stop Talking to Yourself.  He includes 4 ways your conversation with your customer may have grown stale. The company's were probably spending more money building their tower than talking to their customer.