Continuous improvement is based on three primary tenets: identifying & minimizing waste, respecting people, and maintaining a maniacal focus on the customer. My advice today is this: use the holiday shopping season to look for examples of service excellence and service failure.

As the plane taxied out, we made a 90 degree turn onto runway 4-22, sat for 30 seconds or so, and then instead of roaring off into the sky, the engines whimpered and we made another 90 degree turn onto an adjacent empty tarmac. We all sat in relative silence, waiting for the captain to make an announcement about why our takeoff was aborted. We waited, waited, and waited some more.

Today, we have come to expect and demand that friction points in the delivery of a product or service are minimized and that modern technology is applied to improve the customer experience—even in industry or product segments where margins are thin and competition is fierce. Well, this morning I have a customer service story of a company and industry segment that seems to have missed the memo of modernization and transformation to improve customer experience.

If you’re a leader, listen to what your front-line personnel are telling you about what your customers are saying. Actively listen. Meet them on their turf. Tune in directly to customer conversations. Show you care by taking action to improve the experience of your customers. Taking action will result in improved working conditions for your front-line colleagues.

Every employee of every company in the world is involved in value creation and impacts one or more value streams either directly or indirectly. Unnecessary complexity, over-engineered processes, extraneous approvals, and myriad other blockers impede flow and therefore constrain value addition to any process.

The reason I wasn’t surprised by their response is that I’ve become accustomed to marketers and business owners who ask for feedback, but then completely ignore it—opting instead for canned, automated responses. Remember the Seinfeld episode where they “take the reservation, they just don’t hold the reservation?” That’s how this makes me feel as a consumer. I find this behavior astonishing because why ask for feedback if you’re not going to do anything with it. Nothing says “I could care less about my customer” more than asking for feedback and then ignoring it.