In her column in a British business magazine this past summer, Jane Simms reported that CEOs rank customer service above product innovation, sales performance and regulatory compliance as their top priority.

But what struck me most was her recipe for success. “The best way to improve customer service,” she wrote, “is not to invest in expensive research techniques or pointless CRM systems, but to experience the company and its products and services as a customer would.” Referring to the senior executives for one of England’s largest rail companies, she wrote: “How many have recently tried to buy a standard-class train ticket? Because if they did, they would realize what a complex and expensive nightmare that particular exercise has become.”

Yes, we all agree customer service is important. After all, without customers, where would we be? But how many of us genuinely grasp what type of service customers want? More importantly, how many of us truly understand the obstacles customers face when they try to get it?

As we used to say back in my corporate days, customer service starts on the street, not in the tower. By that we meant too many senior executives haul up the drawbridge and retreat to their corner offices, rarely venturing beyond the moat. In the worst cases —and I’ve lived them—the senior execs refuse to listen to the street-level employees who try to convince them their products and services simply aren’t meeting the needs of their customers.

Do you know which aspects of your product or service delivery systems are the most comforting to your customers? The most discomfiting? Have you ever hired “mystery” customers to explore the positives and the pitfalls embedded in your product and service delivery process?

More to the point, have you ever decided to become a customer for a day? Or a week? Or to experience a customer relationship from beginning to end—from the brochure to the phone call to the initial visit to the actual purchase decision to the customer satisfaction follow-up and beyond?

Actor William Hurt starred in a 1991 movie called The Doctor. He played Jack McKee, a doctor who has it all—he’s successful, he’s rich, and he has no problems . . . until he’s diagnosed with throat cancer. Suddenly his world is overturned: He becomes the patient, not the doctor.

He becomes the customer.

Needless to say (this being a Hollywood movie), Dr. McKee eventually realizes there’s more to being a doctor than surgery and prescriptions. At the end of the movie, he orders the five young residents under his supervision to become patients themselves. Each is assigned an imaginary illness, and the first step they must take (over indignant protests, to be sure) is to strip off their clothes and don that ridiculous hospital gown that ties in the back in two places but leaves us, um, exposed. He then forces the residents to undergo for a week all the mysterious tests we as patients know well, all the hurried visits from busy and distracted doctors, all the wonderful food, all the middle of the night wake-up calls for seemingly inconsequential reasons, all the cheerful but distant smiles from harried nurses who’ve just come on shift and aren’t entirely sure why we’re taking up space (I’ve been there, believe me).

So, how many of us have done anything more than conduct rudimentary customer service surveys or talked formally or informally with a few customers? How many of us have actually become customers for our own organizations?

Try it. You might not like it.