Have you ever wondered why GMs top-management never understood why their customers are not buying their cars? Because they have fooled themselves (or have been fooled) and never experienced the real customer experience. Management got lost in a disconnected reality that was based on staged product demonstrations with customized products that were build for one reason: to make top management believe that GM is producing great cars.

One of the best indicators of a customer experience focused organization is the commitment from top-management not only to deliver ordinary products and services but to go the extra mile and surprise and delight customers with a company’s offerings. If top management wants to show real commitment, it has to experience the real customer experience in order to ensure that decision are made based on reality and not on a“virtual reality” based on product demonstrations in the boardroom.

Product Demonstrations vs. Experiencing the Customers’ Experience

In an article from “The Truth About Cars” I have found an interesting statement that described how top-management at General Motors experienced their products:

As you probably know, ever since GM was founded, its execs have either been driven by a chauffeur or provided with carefully prepared and maintained examples of the company’s most expensive vehicles. Of course, there are times when the suits must sign off on the company’s more prosaic products. Since 1953, this intersection between high flyer and mass market occurred at GM’s Mesa, Arizona, Desert Proving Grounds (DPG). The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models. The execs would fly into Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, limo out to the DPG and drive the company’s latest models.

Our agent says that all the vehicles the execs drove were “ringers.” More specifically, the engineers would tweak the test vehicles to remove any hint of imperfection. “They use a rolling radius machine to choose the best tires, fix the headliner, tighten panel and interior gaps, remove shakes and rattles, repair bodywork—everything and anything.”

Did the execs know this? “Nope. And nobody was going to tell them . . . As far as they knew, the cars were exactly as they would be coming off the line. That’s why Bob Lutz thinks GM’s products are world-class. The ones he’s driven are.”

I asked Agent X if the GM execs would ever drive the cars again. Did he know if Wagoner or Lutz dropped in at a dealership to test drive a random sample off the lot? He found the idea amusing.

For a number of reasons, middle-management at General Motors decided that it might be better to deliver a staged customer experience to top-management instead of showing them the real customer experience of driving a GM car. Of course this behavior was probably induced by top-management itself. But for now the cause is not import, the impact this has had is much more important.

If this would have happened in the accounting departments, auditors might have discovered this lack of transparency and there would have been investigations about false accounting practices and false reporting. But in product development the only signs for misinterpretation through staged customer experiences are lackluster sales as well as a management board which is unable to explain them since they have only experienced the greatest products.

Experience is the best Teacher

It is essential for top management to experience the “real” customer experience first-hand. If you are not doing that it is just like looking at your balance sheet that is not audited but merely created to give an impression that everything is fine.

If you are working in a truly customer-oriented company, your CEO will spend time right where the company’s customers are. Without assistants, without a secretary and without his direct reports who ensure that everything is working perfectly. If your CEO is not doing that, you don’t truly have a focus on the customer and one might end up in a situation just like GM – wondering why nobody is buying your amazing products that have been presented in the corporate boardroom.

Read the full article: Inside GM: Mystery of Crap Interiors Solved