The Way the World Works - Customers

The way the world works is through figuring out what type of customer you focus on. Working to attract this type of customer helps you avoid wasting your time and other resources and focuses your company on behaviors and systems that directly affect that type of customer. Strategy and system analysis should be concentrated on selling to the desired customer. Qualifying customers and marketing to the right customer is a winning strategy.

Create a list of top-paying customers and great clients and concentrate resources and talent on them. Keep the top-paying customers. Don’t take precious time and resources away from top customers willing to pay and work to satisfy fringe customer types. Devote more exclusive time to helping core, top customers and gaining more of the same type to make your business flourish. 

You must offer something better for your top customers than the competition has to offer. Focus on social appreciation. This means employees understand the top customers are the reason the company stays in business. Empower employees to help top customers solve problems or concerns. Help employees dig into problems and get solutions. Pay the employees well so they are loyal to the company and want to see the company succeed. Focus on quality. The customer experience needs to be great, each time he interacts with your company. Decrease the time to fulfill orders, and decrease the number of defects in your product or service. Improve communication and relationships with your top customers. Go the extra mile. Focus on comfort. Remove behaviors that cause customer discomfort. Increase self-service.

Analysis serves to tell us something important about our top customers' behavior. Improved processes help elevate the company and improve the customer's experience. Every process should be focused on meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Company processes need to meet business requirements. Sending the wrong product to a customer costs the company money.  Delays in shipping cost the company money in rush order freight costs. Value is measured by the perception of value from the customer's perspective.  Improve the system and working environment to increase quality in the customer experience. Reduce the number of ways to get work done. Make it difficult to do the work wrong or make mistakes. Look for creative ways to improve and streamline the process affecting your top customers. 

Communication breakdowns exacerbate failures. When a process is not working, that's when even more communication is needed--quickly between your company and your top customers. Gaining the attention of the group is important in coming up with solutions for your top customers. When attention is diverted to a customer's problem, the "group think" can be applied. The wisdom of the group is better than a single person at identifying the source of a problem and coming up with a way to fix it. The smooth functioning of the process can be obtained when members of the team can stop individual work processes to alert the team to problems in the system. Unified attention allows management to monitor for stoppages and problems in the system. Efforts to reengineer or monitor areas where stoppages occur can be put in place. The process will become better understood and improved upon by the team working together.

Communication of errors impacting your top customers needs to be communicated quickly to the group. For example, if I’m studying the error logs on an ecommerce site, and I discover many users are creating shopping carts with data but not checking out and paying, then the trend should be monitored. Why are these individuals not checking out? What happened to the user experience? Could there be a systemic barrier preventing checkout? Or is the cart being used as a wish list for future check out? Is there a correlation of future check out for these carts, or are the carts simply being abandoned? The team needs to become aware of the problem and start thinking about how to answer the questions and identify the customer behavior that leads to abandonment instead of sales. Data analysis should tell the team about the customer behavior and make predictions on key indicators. For example, what percent of new carts will be abandoned in three days if checkout does not occur? How much revenue is lost because the customer is not checking out?

It is important not to get lost in complexity. Becoming oriented to how the data is organized is essential. Gaining an understanding of how business is done and how those processes generate data helps piece together the data puzzle. The study of data builds quality because it reveals flaws in the process. Customer data orientation is important in overcoming the feeling of being lost. Visual communication of processes and data analysis can be made available through dashboards, reports or datasets. Know the behavior of your customer, and win!

You can get lost in isolation. Isolation can narrow your perception of the problem. Teams are better because they find the issues relating to problems faster than individuals who are isolated and trying to solve problems in a vacuum. In Isolation, unity is lost. Isolation is self-imposed and limits interaction with people. Isoloation results in less information gathering. Quality decreases from less information gathered and analyzed. Isolation is a choice of behavior and should be shunned. Isolation creates a feeling of being lost and not being a team player. Isolation means doing everything by yourself and slows down time to deliver your product or service. Isolation limits the specialization response to the customer. Get out and talk to people and keep in touch with people. Don’t stay away from people. The danger of isolation is not finding out what people want. You're doing your own thing. You're supposed to be working with your fellow teammates and not doing all the work yourself. Teamwork creates trust. Isolationism makes the team wonder what's going on.

Business intelligence is designed to take complex relationships in data and simplify the presentation of it making it more consumable and valuable for the end user.

Data analysis is the study of data to make predictions and classify trends in the company. The end goal of data analysis should be to understand customer behavior and expectation, and to better serve the needs of your top customers, making your company more successful than ever.