The importance of the customer

Objective

It is a simple and obvious truth that without customers a business doesn’t exist. As a leader you must set yourself the objective of ensuring that across your team and operations, it is the customers’ perspective that is applied in decision-making and planning. This will inevitably mean reaching outside the organisational structure and seeing customers as partners, not simply recipients of goods and services.

This objective will encompass five broad but key areas:

• what products and services customers want;
• how much they are prepared to pay;
• how the business sells and markets itself;
• how the business communicates;
• how the business manages service.

Your role is to ensure that your team has the awareness and humility at all times to see itself through its customers’ prism.

Context

Seeing the customer as ‘prime’ is part of a broader set of cultural statements you make to ensure that your organisation operates in a market-sensitive manner. These include, notably:

• the role of all colleagues in implementing the vision and strategy;
• how all colleagues affect sales;
• how all colleagues ‘market’ the business;
• how customer service is a value for all, not a department;
• the importance of process in all teams to delivering carefully managed customer interfaces.

The central goals are:

• to bind an organisation together in a common purpose where all colleagues know that together they affect performance;
• to prevent fragmentation of effort where the customer is seen to belong to certain departments only.

Challenge

The simple truth of the ‘importance of the customer’ can become overlooked in the challenges of daily business:

• the sheer pressure of events and tasks;
• the absence of discussions about or references to customers by senior managers;
• the cycle of weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual processes, which can becomes ends in themselves;
• the actions of competitors and vendors, which can very rapidly affect day-to-day perceptions of the market;
• a focus on managing systems and processes, which are by definition largely internal;
• the effect of working in a close-knit ‘team’, which again by definition is internal and excludes customers.

The response to these challenges is to make the customer part of the organisation’s lexicon – the reference point for planning strategic development.

Success

To be an effective leader championing the customer you have to be relentless in bringing the customer into focus across your team:

• Talk about the customer – the customer should be referred to in all team meetings, update e-mails and presentations so they are seen to matter.
• Team meeting agendas – time should be allocated to customer issues (separate from sales) at all team meetings.
• Meet customers yourself – this shows you mean it!
• Encourage others to meet customers – as many staff as possible should be encouraged to do this.
• Learn about the customer – meeting customers should be used as a way of learning about how their lives, markets or businesses are changing.
• Customer feedback collection – however collected (meetings, social media, e-mails, phone calls) this should be collated so there is a precise record of what is being said about the business.
• Customer feedback circulation – so that as many colleagues as possible are aware of what customers are saying.
• Customer satisfaction measures – informal feedback should be set alongside formal measures of satisfaction collected through planned surveys.
• Meet new customers – try to find ways to meet people who might be potential customers, and identify what would make them switch.
• Meet customer groups – some customers form groups to represent common issues and you should meet these to understand trends.
• Focus groups – use these with customers whenever it makes sense.
• Strategic planning – define and develop customer strategies in strategic and annual plans.
• Evangelise customers to ‘non-customer’ groups – make a special point of discussing customers with groups who often historically don’t see themselves as having anything to do with sales or service (IT, finance, facilities).

If ever there was an imperative requiring dedication and commitment – even evangelism – this is one. Unless and until you relentlessly ‘talk’ customers to all staff, unless and until they see and hear you are serious, they won’t be.

Pitfalls

The risk of any mantra – which can seem like an obsession – is that it is disconnected from your team’s working experience. Any one of them might say:

• we don’t do the market research;
• we don’t design the product;
• we don’t make the sales calls;
• we don’t take the service calls/complaints;
• we don’t design or write the marketing;
• we don’t manage customer credit;
• we never meet or talk to customers.

And some of them may indeed do none of these. The answer is:

• to implement the actions described above so fully that they cannot but feel connected to customer experiences;
• to ask any doubters to consider – and analyse – what they do that does touch customers and to expand their customer insight from that (narrower) point.

Leaders’ checklist

• Talk relentlessly about the customer – don’t be afraid to do so!
• Talk to all the members of your team – there is no one who does not have customer impact.
• Keep making the point that the customer belongs to everyone and to no single department.
• Lay plans so that as many people as possible actually meet customers.
• Ensure that customer feedback is collated and circulated as widely as possible.
• Identify, collect and publish measures of customer satisfaction.