Are you missing a trick to improve your customer experience?

The CEO of McDonald’s, Jim Skinner, started flipping burgers for the business 40 years ago and apparently he has eaten in a McDonald’s restaurant every single day since then. He does this, he says, so that he can test firsthand the food and service, and also so that he can interact with customers; he sits in the restaurant like an ordinary bloke and chats to fellow diners.

This got me wondering how many businesses actually taste-test their own products. I asked around and the outcome of my small non-statistical sample was down around 30%, although there were a couple of absolute highlights such as RedBalloon, the business operated by fellow SmartCompany blogger Naomi Simson, which is fastidious about checking out it’s own experiences.

The businesses that I spoke to that had checked out their own offering, while disguised as a bona fide customer, all recommended it as a great way of discovering holes in the customers’ experience.

As an experiment, one CEO I know ordered, over the internet, a computer component from his business and arranged for it to be delivered to his home address. He was horrified to find that the courier, with no advance warning, turned up once to his home, found no-one in and then sent it directly back to the company marked as ‘undeliverable’. As a result the CEO sacked the cheap-as-chips courier company and replaced them with the more expensive version because he realised that he needed to use a courier company that was as professional as his business.

Granted, it’s somewhat harder to taste test your business if you are in the business-to-business game, but you could still hang out, incognito, with users. A company I work with that implements software for big businesses has learnt an enormous amount through having some of their junior staff hang out with end users.

Years ago when I was a student at university I spent a summer holiday working at McDonald’s. We were all entitled to, and encouraged to take advantage of, free McDonald’s for dinner. I didn’t regard it as much of a perk so I brought in my own cheese sandwiches, and I didn’t appreciate at the time how much more authentic the customer interactions of my burger-eating peers were than mine. I confess that I wasn’t very engaged in the job, so another tip, watch out for employees who don’t like to eat their own cooking.

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Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).