The most serious customer oversight made by converters is not understanding that customer. Only a few groups within a manufacturing organization are specifically tasked with meeting with, and understanding, the customer. These groups could include product development, marketing, sales or service. In smaller companies, functions may be grouped together so that customer calls are made by a marketing/sales/service person.

There are shortcomings with this jack-of-all trade approach. First, to be good at marketing and sales, you must be people oriented. However, to provide good service, you also need to be highly technical and machine oriented. Ideally, you would have experience as both a designer and as an operator of the customer's type of equipment. Second, to be in marketing or sales you are an advocate of the supplier, while in customer service or support, you would be an advocate of the customer.

Other groups also have a vital need to know the customer, but may never meet them. For example, quality control is tasked with selecting test procedures, sampling intervals and rejection criteria for the product. The whole point of this exercise is to meet the needs of the customer.

Too often, however, we select testing based on the traditional, rather than on the customer's needs. Thus, for example, tensile strength might be specified as rejectable even if the customer doesn't tear the product in usage. Sometimes it seems that test selection is something of a popularity contest, where QA is the judge rather than the customer. Process engineering then gets seduced by this system, so that their efforts become focused on meeting test specifications rather than meeting customer needs.

It is quite telling how customer complaints and returns escape the testing process. While we might measure caliper, gauge bands in the roll still stretch the product into baggy lanes. Other bagginess is not captured by any of our process measurements or lab testing. A roll might look perfect, but then telescope on the customer's unwind because we don't have the equipment to even unwind the rolls we make.

However, the most common oversight is lack of communication. The customer uses words to describe his problem or need, and we interpret them as something else. An example is the term "telescope," which can be used for more than a half-dozen distinctly different phenomena. Often the words are suggestive of causes that, upon further probing, are found not be the causes after all.

Studies have shown that even the most astute customers misdiagnose problems more than half the time. If we take the customer's complaint at face value, we may be set on a dead-end path for troubleshooting and problem resolution. The chain of communication also mangles the message. The customer's operator complains to her supervisor, who then complains to purchasing, who calls the supplier's customer service department, which talks to their management, then to process engineering and finally down to the supplier's operator who made and passed the material in the first place. Lead machine operators and process engineers must work directly with their counterparts through regular visits to avoid losses in translation and transmission.

Lastly, many suppliers commit business suicide with their "the customer is always right" approach. Sometimes the problem, and its solution, is entirely with the customer's equipment, operation, product or process understanding. "We can't tell them that," is something I hear far too regularly from suppliers who are terrified of their customers. If the most or only effective solution lies with the customer, you must confront the problem or it will fester forever. It takes courage and tact, but some customers will respect a well-intentioned and carefully-studied criticism of their process.

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