Its interesting to watch different CEOs of different companies and how they deal with the issue of making customers happy. You can tell the ones that don’t trust their products or services. They travel with big groups of people. There are advance teams to make sure everything is perfect. They bring security to places where their customers are families and kids. They protect themselves from any possible interactions, whether direct, phone or email by having secretaries filter everything, and they respond with formletters or assistants, if at all.
I dont know how they do it. I make my email available to everyone and anyone. Not only that, and more importantly, I make sure that all the customer service emails get forwarded to me. If someone is complaining, I want to know what about, and I want to get it fixed quickly. The best focus groups are your customers telling you what they think. No company is perfect, but the CEO who doesnt listen to direct feedback from customers will not take the company as far as it can go.

So writes Mark Cuban, who owns the Dallas Mavericks and runs HDNet.  At one level, this is curiouslysimilar to the way DWP operates – ministers see a large number of the equivalent of customer service emails (though nobody else very much does).  But the cultural weight behind it is somehow completely different.