Ease of Doing Business Blog

If you’re like me, you probably tend to gravitate toward people and situations with which you’re familiar and comfortable.  There’s a certain amount of human nature involved here.  The same is often true in your business transactions.  When making a major purchase, certainly the quality of the product or service, the price, and terms of the sale are key factors.  But beyond that, people usually want to feel comfortable with the person they’re dealing with in the transaction – the realtor, financial advisor, etc.  “Comfortable” can mean many things, such as similar personality, shared values or common interests. 

But it can also touch on intangible areas, such as trust.  Is this person acting with my interests in mind, or just trying to make a sale and a commission?  Do they really understand what’s important to me in making a decision on this purchase?  These same factors that influence an individual business transaction also come into play in large business-to-business situations.  This is an enormous challenge for a large corporation: how to instill in their employees – and not just the sales force – the importance of ‘personalizing’ each customer, treating them as more than just a purchase order or a support call?  How do they listen, understand, and act even if there’s no immediate sale on the table?  In other words, how do you develop a relationship for the long term while balancing the need to meet short term business targets?  How do you create an environment for ongoing relationship building?

I had the opportunity to attend a Friday night high school football game a couple of weeks ago, which in Texas is THE major event of the week.  At some point in the evening, I became more aware of my surroundings.  For instance there were many people who were actively involved in what was taking place.  Football parents dissected and critiqued each and every play;  Band parents waited patiently  for the band to take the field to witness the latest evolution of the bands performance piece;  drill team moms focused on ensuring their daughters were perfected for their half time performance; cheer leaders pleaded for “De-Fense” and “S-C-O-R-E”; and the majority of the people present just went about whatever it was they were doing, only glancing up from time to time to check the “score”.   It struck me that this was a perfect metaphor for Voice of the Customer Programs.   Many VOC programs have active and committed participants, who work tirelessly every day to ensure our customers have a great experience.  Just as many have part time participants, those who get excited about “big plays”, or pay attention when their area of interest is featured, but then quickly lose focus.  And of course, there are those who only want to know the “score” and not be bothered with all of the plays (we call it insight) that the score represents.  As VOC practitioners, we must constantly affirm that the score is nothing but a number.  In order to be entirely useful, we have to understand the business and customer dynamics behind that number. Of course, many programs have short hand answer to that as well, which we call drivers, or even the top “x” things we need to fix.  It’s not that keeping score is bad, it’s not, and neither is producing a short hand description of what is taking place in our customers’ enterprise.  It’s just that when we limit our understanding to those shorthand indicators, we miss the full context of what is taking place.  To be truly customer focused we have to drop below the macro level of analysis and spend a fair amount of time at the micro, or individual customer level.   Our VOC programs, no, our customers demand and deserve more from us than being passive score keepers.  What do you think?

As my focus is on process improvement, I often get into dialogues about benchmarking and the importance of it.  Wikipedia describes benchmarking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmarking#Metric_Benchmarking as the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time, and cost.   How important are benchmarks? Which is more important: 1)  to meet your customers needs and expectations now or 2)  to look in the rear view mirror and find out how well you stacked up against the competition? I am obviously biased to #1.  Don't get me wrong, I understand that some companies require benchmarking to justify the investment in a process improvement, but I submit those aren't very customer-centric organizations. For me, when customers give you consistent feedback over time to tell you that a process doesn't measure-up, that should be all the proof that is needed. I'm interested in your thoughts. Have you been successful driving a large-scale complex improvement project without benchmarks? Have you used benchmarks successfully to get sponsorship and funding? Have you been able to use the customer voice solely as your rationale for improving?

Lately I've been wondering, which is more effective for making a big change in the ease factor - focusing on systemic problems that affect lots of customers or addressing customer issues one at a time?   When I first started this job, I was told I couldn't make a dent if I tried to find out how to make it easier to do business with HP by tackling individual customer/account issues.  So we took the strategic project approach and made some significant improvements in areas important to most customers. Fast forward to today where we are engaging in customer-focused improvement - one account at a time.  It is definitely a more satisfying experience to talk to individual customers rather than an aggregated list of customer painpoints. As I write this, I believe you really need to do both methods simultaneously. Your individual customers will feed your top list of issues but they need a solution to their specific problem which may be unique and perhaps a short-term fix.  The solution for one customer may not be the best solution for the total set of customers. So,  you also need the strategic projects to drive changes in the corporate system which will benefit all customers. It is definitely a balancing act.