What Your Company Outsourced Its Policies?

Most company policies coincidentally favor the company.

Instead
of respecting customers, they’re more about making excuses, creating insurance,
inhibiting creativity, controlling costs, avoiding accountability, building
deniability, protecting executive egos, appeasing shareholders and covering corporate
asses.

But what if, once a year, companies held an open forum for
customers to submit ideas for new company policies? What if, instead of
operating solely inside their own heads, organizations let the people who know their product best (and the problems
thereof) to shed light on smarter ways of doing business?

Hell,
companies outsource everything else. Why stop there?

Consider
the implications of letting customers design your policies:

Ownership. People want to put
their fingerprints on the things they love. If customers had a real role in
shaping the way they were treated, loyalty would skyrocket.

Engagement. Social
media isn’t a sales tool, it’s a hearing aid. If customers could voice their
ideas through those listening platforms, brand engagement would skyrocket.

Loyalty. When you help paint a fence,
you don’t stand mute while punks spray graffiti. If customers had a greater
stake in the company’s architecture, belonging would skyrocket.

Reputation. Flexibility
is a policy worth having. If customers saw that the company had a disposable
mindset, goodwill would skyrocket.

Look, policies suck. And everyone knows it. Especially the
customers.

But if companies outsourced that function to the people who
matter most, perhaps there would be less friction in their daily interactions.