Blog posts on customer focus

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• Google Website Optimizer

  I think this tool is a very smart move by Google. As I described before, Google’s potential revenue is related to how profitable advertising with Google is for customers. If Google can improve the return of advertisers, the advertisers have more reason to advertise on Google to draw more potential customers. This service would be a good item to apply Barker’s implications wheel to and see what the downstream implications are – I think they are positive for Google 

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• Looking in the Mirror at Customer Focus

  Most organizations say they are focused on meeting and exceeding customer needs. But, as a customer, this often isn’t what I experience.

  Delighting customers is critical to long term business success. Satisfied customers will remain your customers until they see the opportunity for something that might be better or is cheaper. Delighted customers are loyal and much more likely to remain customers.

  Delighting customers is often about paying attention to the small details. Paying close attention to customer’s jobs to be done is a powerful tool. Then apply creative thinking and a knowledge of your industry, technical possibilities and business realities to provide solutions that delight customers.

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• Aligning Marketing Vision and Management

  Why do so many companies market one thing and provide something else? I know it might be easier to sell something different than what you offer your customer today. But if you decide to market one vision, why don’t you change your organization to actually offer that?

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  Treating a marketing message as something separate from management is a serious problem. When your marketing message says one thing and your customers get something else that is a problem. I think the message is often based on what the executives wish the company was (and the outsourced marketers think it should be), but it isn’t the customer experience the management system provides.

  If you believe the vision of your marketing then make sure your organization has embraced those principles.

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• What Loss Will a Business Suffer Due to a Dissatisfied Customer?

  You can’t know how much a dissatisfied customer will cost your business in the long run. You can make statistical judgements about how costly dissatisfied customers are to a business but those are loaded with many guesses. They can give a general indication of the magnitude of the costs but they are largely guesses, not something you can measure.

  Sometimes a business largely gets away poor quality for a long time. The customer doesn’t change behavior, doesn’t complain to others and doesn’t punish the company in the long term. But you never know when one small failure will cause the luck to run out and turn a customer against the business and costing it dearly.

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• The Quality of the Entire Customer Experience

  Product quality, in many ways, has been raised in the last few decades and this naturally results in raised expectations. This pattern was well known in the 1960s (and before). Kano’s theory of customer satisfactionexpressed how new features moved from being “delighters” for customers initially and eventually became minimum expectations (you gain no credit for delivering them but will upset customers if you fail).

  It is also true that raising the overall customer experience is more difficult than raising product quality (due to the nature of the systems that deliver the results in each case).

  I do think there is truth to the idea that customers have raised expectations for businesses to improve the entire experience. Customers are less willing to accept excuses about how the provider is not responsible for various aspects of the experience...

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• Iterative Customer Focus

  Like many of Deming’s ideas the idea of iterative customer focus can seem too simple to be very powerful. But in fact that idea is extremely powerful. Those familiar with agile software development can see the idea of delivering working software quickly and iterating based on actual customer use illustrated in Dr. Deming’s “new way” iterative cycle shown in his paper published in 1952.

  The importance of learning about non-users is something that still today is often overlooked...

  I have written about importance of customer focus to Deming’s ideas in several previous blog posts, including: Customer Focus with a Deming Perspective, User Gemba and the most important customer focus is on the end users.

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• Leading Quality: Some Practical Approaches to the Managers New Job

  Throughout the talk Peter emphasis the importance of viewing the organization as a system and using the knowledge from that view to inform how the organization is lead, managed and how people are able to work. With a systems view it is possible to appreciate how many individual factors interact to impact how successful an organization can be and how those factors interact with each other.

  ...

  Peter Scholtes:

  We need to define what our customers get from us, not in terms of the product that we sell or the service that we offer, but in terms of capability that they acquire from us.

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• Hey Siri, You Can Do Better

  Software testing is more than just automated testing. While checking that specific details work as expected in specific situations with automated testing is very useful it is far from sufficient way to test if software will delight users.

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  software testing also requires thoughtful analysis of the experience of the user and how that is at risk with the current iteration of the software (Software Testers Are Test Pilots). Automated testing is critical as you can create checks for thousands of situations to run extremely quickly each time any changes are made to the software. But it is not sufficient. Many situations can only be explored and experienced by a thinking software tester that uses the software and thinks about how a user might react and how that user could be confused or disappointed by the existing user experience.

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• Learning from Customers

  Create a management system focused on continual improvement that is engaged in seeking out customer feedback and continually improving the value provided to customers.

  Most organizations do the opposite of this. They make put many barriers in the way of customers speaking to anyone that will listen. They put systems in place to discourage feedback from customers.

  ...

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• Great Visual Instruction Example

  This does a great job of explaining what you need to know clearly. While this presentation for Azithromycin doesn’t prevent a mistake it sure makes it much more likely that the process can be completed successfully. We need more effort in creating such clear instructions.

  Visual clarity is more important than lots of words. Applying that concept is not as easy as it sounds but it is a very important idea for instructions to end use and instructions for processes in your organization.

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• It Just Works

  The Kano model of customer satisfaction is an excellent way to view customer expectations.

  The Kano model states that you have expected quality – it just does what it needs to (what is expected). Then more is better type – give me more at the same price and I am happier. But where you really want to get as a company is products and services that delight customers.

  When you are delighted you are not easy prey to other companies. When you are satisfied you are ready for offers that say we will give it to you a bit cheaper or give you a bit more. But if you are delighted you don’t want to leave and instead are telling everyone you know how great this product or service is.

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• Poor Service from Amazon

  First, it is very lousy service to sell someone something and then figure out you don’t have it to sell a few weeks later. Second, if you find you have done such a lame thing – buy it from someone else and deliver it as promised. Third, don’t make it nearly impossible for the customer you just wronged to contact you. This is the equivalent of providing lousy service and then closing the door in someones face refusing to deal with your failure.

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• Customers Get Dissed and Tell

  There are those rare companies where interacting with them is not a dreaded experience: Trader Joe’s, Southwest Airlines, Ritz Carlton, Crutchfield...

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  And then instead of fixing the system, just burn the toast (follow the link for an explanation). Then wait for those that get the burnt toast to tell everyone that you sold them burnt toast. Then, after they do that, go scrape it for them.

   

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• Pleasing Customers

  You need to provide customers what they want, which is not the same thing as what they say they want. Southwest airlines is a good example. Revealed preferences are more important than stated preferences.

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• Confusing Customer Focus (when not thinking systemically)

  ...If I buy a car from a dealer they don’t sell it to me for $100. They don’t agree to not tell the government so I can avoid sales tax. They don’t agree to sell me a car that is not legal in the state. Customer service does not mean doing what is in the interest of the customer irregardless of laws, regulations, good business practices, etc..

  I would say doctors don’t give patients anti-biotics for viral infections (but actually they do). They shouldn’t...

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