Customers! Everything depends and must be focused on them, including your efforts and resources.
I understand that most articles about management focus on internal methods of increasing productivity, problem solving techniques, elimination of non-conformities, Lean tools and other improvement approaches. All of which are undoubtedly very important for any business model. However, this view emphasizes the companies' internal environment. For any business to survive there must be buying customers, who are on the outside.
Top management needs to understand that its company relies on the external environment and on all linked interactions that change its components, creating others or transforming them, strongly affecting the organization, arising opportunities or obstacles to the strategies to achieve the wishes of everyone within the related interest group of the business model.
Customers represent the foundation of strategies at the level of successful businesses. When a company analyzes customers, it simultaneously examines whom to serve, what they want and how to serve them.
An organization cannot be complete if it is not conceived to sell, seek customers, maintain them and increase its long-term business support base. The commercial strategies will only be validated in this sense. It is clear that the marketing strategy is also dependent on how the company uses its internal resources differently from the competition, in order to obtain competitive gains in its market. Its internal robustness and capabilities will help carry out its actions towards the external environment. Strategy and structure have a reciprocal relationship, and the structure flows from the company's strategy.
Is it worth having the best manufacturing flow, state-of-the-art machinery and equipment, robots and all technological and applied innovation, well known as industry 4.0, if there are no customers?
At the beginning of the week I received from a client an example of a customer satisfaction survey. My client knows his company lacks something in this regard and needs further explanation to answer his doubts. My answers/comments to his demand constitute the basis of this article, which highlights some interesting points for those who might be at the same crossroad.
If companies knew the importance of measuring and understanding their customers' satisfaction, they would start doing it right now.
Many companies may question me, arguing that they have been doing it for a long time and have been doing quite well. If this was true, they would not be having so many economic problems.
It is rare to audit an organization that does a great job measuring customer satisfaction. While it is true that most companies survey their customers to determine their satisfaction, most surveys do not achieve its purpose and often provide misleading data. A survey can translate that about 95% of a company's customers are satisfied or very satisfied, but only 40% of those satisfied customers buy again. This suggests that there may be little correlation between customer satisfaction and purchasing behavior. Facts like these are pushing many leading companies today to rethink their entire approach to measure customer satisfaction. More traditional surveys provide data that does not reflect the true opinions of customers and does little to predict their future buying behavior.
The company needs, after hearing the voice of the customers, to ensure that their expectations and needs are deployed to all people and processes along the company's value chain, as they are interconnected and affect client satisfaction in a very distinctive way. This requires quick, but systematic, action so that the customer does not have the displeasure of complaining or is caught by a competitor who has better understanding of its needs and offered something of greater value. Most companies end up placing a heavy burden and responsibility on the customers’ shoulders, making them answer questions about the quality of their services or products. Anyway, for positive or negative responses, these products have already been bought or used. Another point to think about, and we'll see later, is that there are two existing ways of listening the customer's voice: passive and proactive.
What I saw and still see travelling within the business environment are multiple traditional questions, which are addressed to understand details on the mood of the clients and some attributes of the organization, as if they were the ideal ones to guarantee the most important thing: customer loyalty and the continuous acquisition of goods and services. Always the same questionnaires, said surveys, but that are nothing more than evaluations; on the contrary, a research should always evoke a validation method. With even the slightest effort of memory I can restore them here and repeat at least 10 of these common questions. It can only be a coincidence or they simply have been made by the same researchers… Only the color of the paper, the layout and the logo change, even if the companies’ missions and corporate visions are so antagonistic, as in a pharmaceutical industry, a school, a foreign trade consultancy, a public notary, a building company, a haulier or a sausage maker.
Although companies are similar in corporate features, with their bosses, departments, communication channels, organizational charts, machines, equipment, computer services, meeting rooms, etc., each one is different from the other for two singular reasons: people and culture. This alone guarantees the difference between them, the way of thinking, their dreams, their creativity, their strategies, their moral values, in short, no matter how similar two companies are, each one sees the world and the market in its own way. Each one is motivated or at least should be, by individual leadership styles, whether demanded by a group of directors who answer to a board of directors, by one or two majority shareholders or, simply, by the owner. Each company has customers or groups of customers with peculiar expectations and needs, which build the consumption pattern and require a distinguished service and evaluation model.
There is a positioning variant to be considered, based on needs or consumption pattern, when the same customer has different needs, on different occasions or in different types of transactions or relationships. The same person, for example, may have unique needs when traveling for business or pleasure with the family.
The decisions you make about which market to enter and when to leave will never please everyone, so you shouldn't aim for perfection, just do it. By paying attention to the patterns that underlie your best customers value, you can focus on always improving your offering to your potential and current customers.
Knowing and understanding the behavior or consumption pattern of your customers, which is undergoing eternal transformation, can be achieved passively on one hand, when the clients manifest themselves by their own free will: positive feedback through compliments, suggestions etc., or negative, for the demonstration of their dissatisfaction or for complaints through communication channels such as the always busy and boring 0800, web page for "contact us", "ombudsman", "answer the survey and win a freebie” etc. On the other hand, you can seek the content of this pattern through proactive actions such as visits, personal interviews or through the submission of surveys, as you wish. For both cases, there is a lot of technique to be respected, in addition to a simple creation of a survey.
The challenge for companies is to probe, monitor, predict and evaluate the most significant elements in each segment. The result of these initiatives must be an acknowledgment of changes, trends, threats and opportunities. The accuracy of this assessment will determine the success of the resulting marketing strategies.
ISO 9001:2015 Standard does not explicitly require, like its former versions, companies to carry out customers satisfaction surveys. It requires the company to ascertain and understand their perception, and whether the company is on a path that converges with its needs or on an antagonistic route to the consumption pattern.
The way is yours and private, however, your measures are meaningless without methods, goals and strategic purposes. A customer service can be divided into two parts: the first part is the behavior or actions that the employee must perform, and the second is the criteria that specifies how well the action should be performed. Standards should always be declared in a way that allows compliance to be measured in a reliable and objective manner.
Many researchers list patterns including words and phrases as "in a friendly way", "showing empathy for the client", "promptly", "efficiently" or "personalized service". While they can all be good ways to describe a service, they are neither accurate nor objectively measurable. My definition of “quality of care” may be very different from yours.
To make it even more complicated, I ask the following question: is this what will make your customer buy again? If you are not quite sure how to answer that, first understand your client! Most companies impose on consumers pre-formatted questions or consumption patterns that can be completely disconnected from the real drivers of purchasing.
A company’s main customer service standards must be derived from the customers’ needs and expectations. As we are always suppliers and customers at the same time, you must realize, when answering a questionnaire with such purpose, how you feel compelled by the research company to answer questions as if they were your own consumption pattern and repurchase motivator.
It is not about seeking information or feedback, but how to use its relevance to improve relations with customers and other stakeholders within the business model. It is essential for any organization that wants long-term stability to improve its processes and identify opportunities. The customer's voice is key to capture information related to your customer. The customer's voice processes must be proactive and continuously innovative to fish their stated, undeclared and anticipated requirements, needs and desires. The goal is to achieve customer loyalty and build lasting relationships, as appropriate.
It is also important to understand that the duration of this relationship evokes a future term and the company needs to consider this time horizon to determine the future requirements of customers. This period should be based on trends and the frequency of changes in its segment and within a reasonable time frame to foresee trends. It is also important to anticipate how the needs of new and existing customers can change. In other words, predict how your current and potential customers' buying behavior will change. This adequate forecast is an opportunity to be leveraged and will make a difference in the future conquest of market positions.
In strategic terms, the assessment of customer satisfaction must be implemented to gain an understanding of important elements of the relationship with customers and consumers, as appropriate, that will contribute to the continuity of the business model. What is expected from customer satisfaction is profitability at the end of the fiscal year, however, the company needs to be aligned with the changes in the market, because, if they change the wishes of customers, your company needs to be continuously aware.
Companies need to constantly revitalize themselves in a world that is less tolerant or complacent to accept old products and old ways of doing things. Most ideas for improvement come from customers asking questions, and not answering questions. A company must create a system to request and capture these ideas if it wants to continuously improve, that is, to keep selling. If a company does not do it, these ideas will be completely lost, or worse, captured by a competitor.
Stop asking nonsenses! Don't waste your client's time or burn your resources! Try to find the way to invest resources for innovation. Is your proactivity decisive? Does your client give you preference due to digital access to its demands or because you anticipate its orders and wishes? Go there and ask!
And don't forget that all your strategic actions must be aligned with the wishes and movements of your customers, for which your competitors are always looking!