Generally, managers think that giving customers what they want will be the fastest way to ruin. They imagine their customers will want ‘the shop’ and will stop at nothing to take all that they can.
Managers think you have to ‘balance’ service and cost. Only higher prices will get customers better service. There is no ‘balance’ between service and cost; the truth is that as service improves costs fall.
Managers are generally oblivious to the costs their services carry because of the failure to give customers what they want.
When they start to see these costs – and they discover their current approaches to ‘performance management’ ignore the reality of performance – they begin to realise that giving customers what customers want will drive costs out of the system.