A Quote by Larry McVoy

Customers and contracts are like water and a sieve. The customer will find the largest hole and slide through it. — © Larry McVoy
Customers and contracts are like water and a sieve. The customer will find the largest hole and slide through it.
Often, very talented technical people find it extraordinarily difficult to take the viewpoint of customers, who are often ignorant about the technology and who may have strong and perhaps incorrect prejudices about it. The technical people may believe, deep down, that they know better what customers "should" need. Customers, of course, have a different perspective. They want products that will solve customer problems and provide other customer benefits, and will do so without undue risk or cost. Not infrequently, customers view advanced technology itself as a risk.
His answer trickled through my head like water through a sieve.
The elks, on the other hand live up in the hills, and in the spring they come down for their annual convention. It is very interesting to watch them come to the water hole. And you should see them run when they find it is only a water hole. What they're looking for is an 'elk-a-hole'.
When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.
The outside-in discipline requires that you have an explicit customer-based reason for everything you do in the marketplace. Managers need to create what I call "customer pictures," verbal descriptions of customers that highlight the key customer characteristics and make those customers come alive. Although managers never know as much about customers as they want and need to know, the outside-in discipline requires that they construct customer pictures anyway, basing the pictures on whatever hard data they have plus hypotheses and intuition.
What you find is, you have to deliver a product that has value to the customer. When you do, and I think the wind community is getting much closer to that, customers will want it.
Service Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.
That's a very critical phase in customer service because you can start to really understand what part of customer service has value to customers and what part is bothering customers.
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
My aspiration is that M&M become one of the most customer-centric organizations in the world. If we focus on understanding our customers, we will be able to develop customer-centric innovations.
Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
Quality that significantly exceeds the customer's expectations doesn't seem to pay off. This 'delight the customer' stuff isn't rewarding. One has to be careful about delighting customers too often, because it sort of reshapes customer expectations.
I have connected by phone with customers who have left negative reviews and had a chance to get to know them. Not only was I able to solve their problems, a lot of the customers were so happy with the customer service that they become repeat customers.
I think maybe 50 years ago people and businesses felt like they had to choose between maximizing profits and making customers happy or making employees happy, and I think we're actually living in a special time where everyone's hyperconnected, whether through Twitter or blogs and so on. Information travels so quickly that it's actually possible to have it all, to make customers happy through customer service, to make employees happy through strong company cultures, and have that actually drive growth and profits.
Lyft is focused on the customer - the driver - as GM is. I've talked many times about our goal being, 'How we can put the customer at the center of what we do so we earn customers for life?' It's a very common goal of putting the customer first.
The Customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an a**hole. That's the first rule of retail.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!