Expert Advice - September 2006

Customer Centering

The Key to Success

by Douglas Beckley

During my early days in banking, I attended a reception and was complaining to a friend about my workload. My whining was short on substance and long on intensity. I recall saying something like, "If it weren’t for all those customer interruptions, I could really get some work done!"

My comrade’s eyes drifted away from me and over my shoulder. I turned and looked straight into the eyes of our bank’s CEO. As I looked for an escape, he put his hand on my shoulder and explained to me as a grandfather would to a child, that those customers are your work – they are the source of your paycheck, and if they were not here, you wouldn’t be either.

In business, from time to time we all lose sight of that often-quoted law: customers are not an interruption of work, but the purpose of it. We all know this truth, but often we are consumed with managing our day-to-day workload. Getting refocused on customers is a matter of adjusting our attitude.

Customers (with the possible exception of power company customers) are not dependent on us. We are dependent on them. They are human beings with feelings and emotions, and they are deserving of the most courteous and attentive treatment we can give. They are the lifeblood of all businesses.

But how do we live this attitude? How do we continually center our business around customers, rather than requiring them to work around us? Here are my recommendations:

1. Obtain Customer Feedback. The first step in knowing where to go is knowing where you are. It is imperative that all businesses construct and implement a customer feedback program. There are a variety of interview forms, questionnaires and other methods available to do this. Ensure that feedback on customer satisfaction reflects a representative cross section of customers and that the sample size is large enough to be valid.

2. Evaluate Yourself. After feedback is gathered, bring your company staff or team together and – with brutal honesty – complete an evaluation of how customer-focused you are. Ask yourselves the tough questions. Is your culture totally committed to creating what a well-known author calls "Raving Fans"? Does this culture exist at all levels (especially the lowest ones) of the organization? As you go though this process, utilize a self-test or questionnaire with a list of these kinds of questions and score yourselves on your answers.

3. Identify Your Customer Orientation: Belgard, Fisher and Rayner, Inc., in their Customer Advocate Workbook, identify four types of organizations based on their degree of customer orientation.

• Speculation Based: Very limited knowledge of customer needs and unresponsive to changes in customer requirements.

• Information Based: Knowledgeable about customers’ historical requirements and low responsiveness to changes in requirements.

• Service Based: Knowledgeable about customer’s historical and present needs and responsive to changes in customer requirements.

• Desire Based: Highly knowledgeable about current customer needs and their desires for the future. Utilizes knowledge of customers to anticipate and prepare for likely changes in customer requirements; demonstrates extraordinary responsiveness.

4. Develop an Improvement Action Plan: The final step in this process is to act on it. Use the feedback information; discuss your strengths, challenges and areas to improve. Create a plan that holds you and the company accountable for implementing necessary changes.

Once you have undergone this process, not only will your customer satisfaction numbers improve, but so will the success and prosperity of your organization.

Douglas Beckley
Douglas Beckley is founder and president of The Beckley Group, a Las Vegas-based management consulting and customized training company.