# ⇄ Customer access needs a budget
Understanding · system · https://build-here.africa/book/chapters/04-13-customer-access-is-a-budget-not-a-value.html

## What you are asking for

You want the team to understand customers better. Someone asks to talk to a customer. Nobody knows how.

## What the system hears

> "If every conversation with a customer needs three approvals, I'll do without."

## What that produces

Customer access costs time: organising, preparing, following up. If nobody funds that time, the team learns the field from tickets and from what sales says. It then builds for an imagined customer.

The people who own the customer relationship are the way in. They know who would be willing to talk, when, and how to avoid asking the same customer ten times. Give them the time to do it.

Prepared cases, an hour listening in on support, a three-way call: there are several ways to learn. Choose the simplest one that answers the question.

Make the route simple and known: who to ask, how long it takes, for what. A team that knows how to talk to a customer does it.

## The decision

→ With customer relations, set a simple route: who organises, how fast, and how.

→ Book the time of the people who organise as much as the time of the people who talk.

→ A month later, look at how many conversations happened and what they changed in the decisions.

## To discuss

How many of us talked to a customer this month?