The dumbest question in the world...ever.

In all my years in business, and there have been quite a few of these, I have heard businesses say many dumb things and ask many stupid questions.

Like 'your call is important to us so please don't hang up'. If it means that much to you why don't you have more people on the phones then!

Or how about 'our Marketing Director doesn't speak to customers'. Of course he or she doesn't, he or she is far too important to speak to the one person who pays his or her wages.

But the one question that takes the title of the 'Stupidest Question in the World Ever' is this-who owns the customer?

This is a question normally asked by a channel or product unit keen to 'own' the customer that they might sell to them. And I have known businesses tie themselves in organisation knots of Gordian complexity in an attempt to provide an answer to the question in neat pigeon-hole fashion. In essence businesses with this approach see customers as targets to be allocated neatly across the business.

It never seems to occur to people to ask whether or not customers want to be owned.

And I always like to work off the premise that no customer wants to be owned. Indeed any brand or business only borrows the customer’s attention for a limited amount of time and if you are really lucky they just might get added to their repertoire.

You might be able to influence their brand choice but in no sense do you own the customer and indeed most customers would run away from you if they ever thought they were owned or were part of some corporate tug of war between competing and internal arms of the same business. Indeed most customers won't even appreciate the subtleties of internal structures and politics. They just see the name over the door.

So that is one reason why it is the dumbest question ever-it is fatuous.

But there is a second reason-it is the wrong question.

The right question to ask is not who owns the customer but who owns the customer experience. And this is where it starts to get fascinating.

For it is my observation that businesses which will expend significant amounts of effort to determine customer ownership will glibly respond to the proper question by saying 'we all do'.

Really?

If everyone owns something then no one does and in this situation the customer loses through a sub optimal customer experience. No business would say we all own the P&L and hope to remain solvent; or say we all own health and safety and hope colleagues avoid a paper cut; or say everyone is responsible for setting our own conditions of employment and hope to remain competitive.

Yet it seems rather foolish to me that in those businesses where everyone is accountable, they assume that this will be a good thing for its customers. It won't be. So get a grip.

And so there you have it, my nomination for the dumbest thing ever said by a business. Unless of course you know better.