Your Customer’s Expectations Are Your Future
By Louis Columbus
Every day, manufacturing companies write their own futures. Many do this formally, creating strategic plans and aligning resources to these long-term efforts. Yet in the many moments of truth with customers, resellers and channel partners, the future is indelibly written by the service, support and guidance customers receive every day.
It is in these moments of truth with customers where truly great companies emerge. Reaping the benefits of meeting and exceeding customer expectations is where sustainable growth comes from. With that growth comes confidence, and a passion for service. Managing customer expectations in these thousands of moments of truth each day gives companies freedom to excel in their core businesses even more.
If you’re a publicly-traded company those expectations percolate to both investment and industry analysts, eventually influencing your stock price and valuation. The best manufacturing companies look to these moments of truth as the building blocks of a strong reputation with the investment community and for future growth.
Expectations are a covenant with your customers
Changing a company’s culture to give front-line employees the tools necessary for delivering excellent service and capitalizing on these moments of truth starts with these strategies:
Invite your channel partners and top customers to the development table. These forums are called Advisory Councils, and are very useful for validating product roadmaps, reviewing potential channel strategies and making complex product decisions based on how it will affect your channels and customers. In one Advisory Council and entirely new software application and service strategy was created based on reseller and customer feedback.
Don’t ignore website-based e-mail and content from customers. Don’t ignore e-mails and content from your prospects and customers visiting your website. At the very least get a list manager that can provide an automated response. The goal is responsiveness and recognition that your company has received the message. World-class manufacturers are also using linguistic models to look for patterns in the thousands of messages and comments in this data. Consider unleashing your IT team on this task; there are several excellent companies offering software for this linguistic analysis of customer’s unstructured data.
Be your own customer once every three months. If you’re a manufacturer selling to consumers, be a customer every three months. See what they have to go through from an ordering perspective, and be sure to go back and check your orders’ status, call and see if the same message comes from your call center – in short exercise your own systems as a customer would and look for areas of improvement.
Get Impartial Win/Loss Reports. Regardless if you have an indirect or direct channel strategy, selling to chains and distributors or directly to large accounts, you need to have impartial and honest win/loss reports to improve. Too often manufacturers do these on their own and accounts lost to competitors either are too polite or just too busy to give the honest feedback needed to grow. Get an outside firm that specializes in win/loss analysis to provide this information for you. On the positive side, you’ll see where you are excelling and may not have known in, and on the negative, places where you have fallen short of expectations.
Index bonuses and compensation to customer satisfaction. You have your choice of a carrot or stick strategy when it comes to making the moment of truth with your prospects and customers. Of the two, the carrot of excellent service as recorded in a customer satisfaction survey is longer lasting than any strategy of negative reinforcement. Get this data monthly and make sure it’s prominently displayed. Set reasonable targets and index bonuses and salaries to customer satisfaction.
Grow Services Champions. Practice these steps long enough and add your own, and soon you will have leaders emerge from Sales, Service, Support, Operations and nearly every other customer-facing organizations. Turn these people into champions and make sure their exemplary performance to customers is visibly recognized.
Bottom line: Manufacturing’s greatest challenge is to link the myriad of activities today with the growth required in the future. While strategic plans are useful roadmaps, it is in the many moments of truth every day where world-class manufacturing companies are built.
Posted by LOUISCOLUMBUS on August 2, 2005 at 12:10 PM in Customer Dialogue | Permalink
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