Satchel Paige, the legendary baseball pitcher, once said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” That’s good business advice. If you get too satisfied with your past achievements, your competitors will gain on you fast. Your customers might love you today, but as the song goes, will they still love you tomorrow? Not if another company finds ways to serve them better while you rest on your laurels.
Great companies have the mentality of champion athletes and great artists and visionary inventors: they never stop searching for ways to improve. If you want your business to be known for customer service, every employee should constantly be looking for ways to do it better tomorrow than they do it today—and to keep on doing it even better next week, next month, next year. Every one of the Customer Rules is about doing it better, and every one is a never-ending process, not a one-off. If you believe you have already reached the pinnacle, it is only a matter of time before you’ll be asking, “Where have all the customers gone?”
Better is not a destination; it is a journey. You never arrive at better; it is always in the future, because there is always an even better way to serve your customers. So strive to be moving constantly in that direction, and never look back. Although you might be doing it as well as it can possibly be done today, you may find that tomorrow brings a new idea, a new procedure, a new employee, a new insight—something that raises the bar a wee bit higher. Put what you did today, yesterday, and the day before in the past, and leave it there. This is today—the day you can call your team or your staff together and have a meeting devoted entirely to one question: “How can we do it better tomorrow?”