How do we find out what customers really want?
‘Ah’ I hear you shout, ‘that’s obvious, just ask them!’
But as the old saying goes, there’s ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’- just ask Damian Green MP following his well-publicised spat with the UK Statistics Authority a couple of weeks ago. In other words you can make any response support a chosen path if it’s projected in a certain way.
So simply asking customers about their real desires in an unstructured way is unlikely to produce the best result as it’s little more than a game of chance.
Having led a wide range of workshops and exercises on this topic over many years, for me the true position of what customers ultimately value and want lies in the appropriate use of two of the techniques in our Customer-Centric Business Change Framework – ‘Voice of the Customer’ and ‘Kano.’
I’ll not go into the details of how we apply the techniques here, except to say that they combine to form a powerful rules-based method for first obtaining and then examining information across a range of external customers and then comparing results with customer-facing staff from the client organisation.
Results from this seemingly simple approach, once analysed, serve to expose both the strong and trace elements of what customers really want.
It is very easy either to dismiss or completely ignore this part of system change design. After all, it costs time and money to meet customer focus groups and some of the initial feedback received may not be too complimentary. But the wealth of information that always pours from these sessions should be seen as one of the best investments any organisation can make in understanding what their ideal range of products and services should consist of.
Getting to the heart of what really satisfies customers is the first and most important step in designing customer-centric business solutions – those that put the customer right at the centre of an organisation’s business decisions. Simply put, if customers are considered stakeholders that run through a company as an integral part of their own DNA then it’s time to open the champagne, as you’ll have succeeded in delivering what customers really value and want.
At Charteris we concentrate on the needs of customers and citizens, sometimes taking seemingly insoluble problems and sorting them out by working directly with the customer’s needs and wants. Customers are massively complex and not easily neatly labelled and put into ‘boxes’. In my experience it’s not unknown for an organisation’s customers to find solutions to some very thorny problems that would have previously ended up on the company’s ‘parked list’ and never progressed. When compared with a popular alternative approach where internal groups of senior managers spend months trying to decide what customers really want and how to meet this challenge based on customer feedback forms, I think the benefits of quicker and better decision-making resulting in shortened time to market for new products and a faster return on investment are obvious.
In the final analysis it is relationships between people that really count. Even the most powerful companies on the planet still list people as their principal assets above all else. Another highly relevant saying comes to mind, ‘people buy people first.’
To me the emphasis on ‘first’ is very important as it stresses that customers like that warm, personal approach so often promoted at the start of a relationship to extend in a durable way far beyond the time of their initial buying decision. Applying this approach when designing customer-centric change, all efforts should be made to create ‘personal process paths’ that allow for a level of individual flexibility on the part of an organisation’s customer-facing staff as well as for their customers. After all, very few people that I have met are box-shaped, so why keep trying to fit us into one!
Alan Miles
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