Leader In Sales, Marketing, Quality or Service

Today's customers are more informed, resourceful, demanding and savvy than they have ever been. Information technology has put vast amounts of data at their fingertips. The Internet and other channel advances have further intensified competition among suppliers. Commoditization has driven customer expectations to new highs. And given the over-capacity of our current economy, each customer knows that better, faster and cheaper alternatives are just a click away. The customer is king - again!

To win in this economy, companies must get much better at understanding and anticipating customers' expectations, defining and measuring customer value, and managing the total customer experience. Tools and initiatives like CRM, CSM, TQM, CQI and others, clearly have significant value and a key role to play in addressing this challenge. However, they may not be dynamic, penetrating or forward-looking enough to provide real clarity around the customers' unstated and unmet needs. For that, you need honest engagement with the customer on a regular basis, taking place at as many contact points as possible. This responsibility can't be left to the traditional Relationship Manager model because there are too many voices of the customer that can get filtered out in that model; and any of these other voices can also strengthen, or weaken, a supplier's foothold. To hear all of the voices, you need as many listeners as possible.

That's where other segments of your organization come into play. Companies that excel in satisfying customers share at least one common practice: various employees - not just those with front-line jobs - spend a significant amount of time interacting in depth with customers. In customer-driven companies, employees are increasingly organized and deployed around customer processes, needs and outcomes. They are inspired, and shown how, to learn as much as possible about customers, and focus on new ways of delivering value to those customers. Unfortunately, while many leaders intellectually agree with this thinking, they will often side step it because they aren't sure how to make it happen.

This is where our Value Chain Labs come into play. They bring multiple players from a company together with multiple players from that company's customers, to examine their value chain relationship. Lab participants define and prioritize customer needs, plans and concerns, as well as the supplier's perspectives; and identify specific behaviors and practices that - when leveraged - can create competitive advantage for both sides. The labs are not customer focus groups or gripe groups, nor are they one of those isolated events that are here today and gone tomorrow. They are the key vehicle for launching and sustaining a results-driven, joint process for achieving lasting customer-supplier relationships - the kind that yield economic value.

Companies that have conducted these and similar cross-boundary workouts believe the more they engage and learn about their customers, the better they become at satisfying those customers, and the more difficult it will be for a competitor to lure them away. Companies who have conducted these workouts typically begin with the same series of questions or concerns that may be going through your mind right now. For example, supplier company leaders might fear: being confronted by the customer with the kinds of issues that can surface in such a session; their inability to effectively deal with such issues; and the new, possibly greater, expectations that might need to be met as a result of such a session. They might be uncertain about: how to create customer interest in participating in a lab; whether the process will work with a particular (unique) customer; or whether both sides will see it as time well spent. And lastly they might be doubtful about the process' ability to produce tangible results, and might doubt that it will be anything more than a short-term event. Good questions - all of which we have helped participating clients think through and resolve before moving forward. It is a big step, but we think the rewards...and risks of not doing it...are big as well.

Is your company doing enough to protect the investment it has in its customers? Is your company positioned for success in today's customer-driven economy? If you're not convinced with a "yes' answer, want to learn more about how this approach might help you, or how you might pilot it within a select part of your organization, just give us a call at 866-302-9099, or drop us a line at info@centricperformance.com.

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