There are more aspects of the variability question, but our point here is fairly simple: customers can wreak havoc on your operations. It's what makes us hesitate when we hear "the customer is always right" or that the path to service excellence is to simply delight your clients. Performance can't be sustained by placing customers on a pedestal and indulging their every desire.' To create a system in which excellence is the norm, you need to manage your customers every bit as much as you manage your employees.

Here's a common pattern: You're new. You're scrappy. You'll do whatever it takes to meet the needs of your clients, which means growth by any means necessary. If a customer wants to give your standard offering a slightly different spin, sure, you'll give it a try. Your effort is also known as customizing your product or service. At this point, there's such a premium on developing customer relationships that you're not thinking about how to pull this off in a profitable way. Instead, you're thinking about survival. If you can keep a growing number of customers happy, then good things are more likely to happen.

There are more aspects of the variability question, but our point here is fairly simple: customers can wreak havoc on your operations. It's what makes us hesitate when we hear "the customer is always right" or that the path to service excellence is to simply delight your clients. Performance can't be sustained by placing customers on a pedestal and indulging their every desire.' To create a system in which excellence is the norm, you need to manage your customers every bit as much as you manage your employees.

Here's a common pattern: You're new. You're scrappy. You'll do whatever it takes to meet the needs of your clients, which means growth by any means necessary. If a customer wants to give your standard offering a slightly different spin, sure, you'll give it a try. Your effort is also known as customizing your product or service. At this point, there's such a premium on developing customer relationships that you're not thinking about how to pull this off in a profitable way. Instead, you're thinking about survival. If you can keep a growing number of customers happy, then good things are more likely to happen.

A major driver of increasing customization is simply listening to, and trying to please, your customers. Of course, the answer is not to ignore them. It's to listen to them strategically and to customize where it counts. Customize where you can deliver real value and get paid for it without wreaking havoc on your operations — but not where you make a few customers happy at the expense of large swaths of employees, stock-holders, and other customers.