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3 Basic Steps to Focusing on Customers
Customer and partner focus can be boiled down to three broad steps.
1. Identify Current Customers and Partners
This is clearly the starting point. But is takes a lot more thought and
discussion then most management teams realize. We need to identify the
various end users or customer segments we choose to serve. In today's
fast moving world, we can't be everything to everybody. Segmenting our
markets and customers is critical. We might divide them by demographics
such as size, age groups, geography, income levels, buying patterns, frequency
of doing business, and so on.
However, few organizations have also looked at their customers from a
psychographics perspective. These are the values and attitudes that define
our customers' organization culture or personality type. This type of
segmentation or analysis is especially useful in developing a composite
profile of ideal customer segments. Not all customers are equal. Some
are more profitable, easier to serve, better fit to our organization's
unique strengths, or are just more enjoyable to do business with. These
are important considerations in deciding whom to target our customer acquisition
and retention efforts toward.
2. Prioritize Expectations
In Top Performance, Zig Ziglar tells of an elderly couple celebrating
their fiftieth wedding anniversary. After a long day of celebration and
honors, they prepare to retire for the night. As they've always done,
the husband prepared their bedtime snack of buttered toast, jam, and milk.
When his wife sat down to the snack in front of her, she burst into tears.
Concerned, her husband went to her, embraced her and asked what was wrong.
She tearfully replied that after such a special day she hoped that he
would have finally stopped giving her the end piece of bread. Shocked
and surprised her husband replied, "But after all these years I thought
you knew that I think that's the best piece of all."
So often the priorities we assume others have are projections of our
own values and preferences. That can be deadly. We need to go beyond The
Golden Rule. Instead, we need to serve people the way they -- not we --
want to be served. There might be a big difference. Since we're seeing
customer and partner expectations from inside our organization or management
team, we can't possibly have the same perspective as they do.
However detailed or complex we ultimately make it, there are four basics
for uncovering and prioritizing expectations:
- Getting customers or partners together in focus groups is generally
the most productive. But we can gather expectations through individual
interviews as well.
- We can gather perceptions and expectations from competitors' customers,
people who've stopped doing business with us, and those who could but
don't use our products or services now.
- We should always start with a blank sheet of paper, never a preconceived
list. This begins by asking our focus group to brainstorm the factors
most important to them when using our products or services.
- Once we have a complete list, we need to get our focus group to rank
or weight all the factors on the list. Generally about 20 percent of
the service/quality features or services contribute up to 80 percent
of the perceptions of good or bad service or quality (The Pareto Principle
or 80/20 Rule).
3. Gap Analysis
The point of all your customer and partner research is to pinpoint and
target areas for improvement. In step two, we learned what our current
customers and partners, as well as the broader market consider to be the
most important product, service, and support factors. Now we want to analyze
and assess the gaps between their expectations and our performance. With
these targets, we can aim our improvement efforts much more accurately
to close the performance gaps. They also provide the basis for benchmarking
our performance against other highly effective teams or organizations.
Performance gap analysis can be as narrow and as simple as the difference
between the top priorities of particular customer or partner and how well
they perceive we are delivering on their preferences. Or they can be as
broad as an entire market including our competitors' customers and people
who don't use our type of products or services -- yet.
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