Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Providing quality services is much more difficult than producing quality goods. Defective articles
may be determined at the end of process, removed and not shown to the user. Defective service
has already happened, and a user was part of that process. It is impossible to hide mistakes in
service provision. Service must be done well every time. That is a special challenge for
management.
Clients and consumers
The one who consumes the product is a consumer; the one who pays for the product is a client.
Consumers provide justification for the existence of the organization. Clients provide resources for
the organization. Consumers of toys are children; however the clients are adults who buy these
toys. Consumers of nice rings with brilliance are nice women, usually not married, but clients are
men with some money, usually married, paradoxically. Consumers of public services are all
members of a community, but the client for providing needed service organizations is the local
government that places orders and pays for them.
Consumer and client are not the same generally. Sometimes they may coincide in one person or
subject, in many other cases not. To sort them out is very important, because they are not in an
equal position. First of all – an organization should satisfy the client. Satisfaction of final users, or
consumers, may be only one of the client’s requests.
That is why so many useless and even harmful public organizations exist, and keep their clients
absolutely happy. Consumers are not happy, but who cares? The distance between clients and
consumers of public services may be huge. It all depends on how real the democracy is, how big
the bureaucratic hierarchy is, how much it is corrupt, and how well the services are organized
For a commercial organization that provides services (or produces goods), which go straight to the
client, who is often a consumer or very close to the consumer, the best indicator of usefulness is
the price the client agrees to pay and the amount of sales.
On the other hand, each client is a consumer of a kind, because he is motivated to pay for
something that constitutes value for him, although it is not exactly the product of an organization.
For example – a husband may pay for drugs to help his wife sleep better, which may be also good
for him. Local politicians may expect to become a bit more popular after making a decision to
allow the administration to spend some public money on fireworks of one or another kind.
Organizations usually know what they produce for their customers, but sometimes fail to think
enough about what they actually do for their clients.
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