The Importance of the Customer

Abstract

A chapter on the customer may seem out of place in a book on employment policies. However, it is desirable because of the danger that those who are concerned with employment policies or human resource management see these activities as ends in themselves. They are not. Rather they are means to the end of serving the customer. As Peter Wickens has reminded us:

Companies are not in the employee relations business, any more than they are in the cost control business, industrial engineering business etc. They are in business to sell profitably a product desired by the customer. Though employee relations might be exemplary, if the product is of poor quality, the design bad, or the market changes, the company can go out of business or the factory close.¹

Jobs come from customers and from nowhere else. Employment: The Challenge for the Nation HMSO, 1985