“If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.” -- Dr. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Learning cannot be disassociated from action.” -- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

“The most important measures are both unknown and unknowable.” -- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis

Who are Your Key Customers? by Kevin McManus

Who are your key customers? It sounds like an easy question doesn’t it. In fact, the answer seems obvious - it’s the people who spend money for our goods or services. While that answer may be right, in this case, a simple answer is not the best one. Any given organization has several types of customers, whether they recognize that fact or not.

Great organizations segment their customers in order to gain a better definition of who their customers are. Some go even further by defining their stakeholders, or in other words, all groups that hold a stake in the success or failure of the enterprise. In order to grow an organization over time or to raise your levels of customer delight to higher and higher levels, you need to know who your customer segments and stakeholders are.

Also, if you really want to get sustained, great results over time, it is important that everyone in your organization knows who the key customer groups are and what needs each of those groups has. I have worked in companies where I did not even know who the customers were, other than to know that they were the people that bought our products. As my career progressed however and I had the chance to work in organizations where all employees got to interact with the external customers to some degree, I began to realize the power that comes from such a connection.

I also learned that as the amount of contact increases between each employee and each customer group, the level of customer service increases. I saw a direct correlation between the percent of time employees spent with customers and the level of customer service. More time equaled higher service because we could (1) attach a name and face to the customer label and (2) by their reactions we could gain a greater understanding of what their likes and dislikes were.

Do you know what your key customer segments are? Do you know how customer needs differ in importance between segments? What percentage of your workforce gets to spend time with their customers? Who are your key customers, and how do you determine if you are giving them what they really want?

Is There a Difference?

One of the workshops that I enjoy facilitating has to do with the forgotten customers - in other words, your internal customers. When you look at the ten power systems in total, you might notice that I do not distinguish between internal and external customers when it comes to defining customer requirements and measuring to gauge levels of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. I do this on purpose because I consider both groups to be equally important and essentially the same.

It is true that their needs are different, but that does not mean that you should spend more effort or use better approaches with one group as opposed to the other. You need to meet and exceed the key needs of both customer types in order to have sustained organizational success over time. Neglect one group, and your performance will eventually falter.

If you judge customer importance in terms of the time and money that is focused on one group versus the other, I think you will find that in most cases the level of investment is greater for the external customer group. This may seem logical, since this is the group that gives your organization money in one form or another. The internal customer group either makes money or loses money for you however, so we might really want to question this investment difference if we are trying to take our organizations to a higher level of performance.

What Do Your Customers Really Want?

How does your company decide what products and services its customers really want? Do you use focus groups and surveys? Do you spend time in the field watching customers either buying your product or making purchase decisions that involve it? There are a variety of ways to determine customer requirements, but all too few companies use more than simply their own opinions.

That’s right - many decisions about what the customer wants are made in meeting rooms, simply by reviewing written summaries of customer meetings or discussing what we think the customer wants. Great companies however use a host of fact-based approaches to create a list of possible customer wants and to prioritize those wants before converting them into product and service features.

The example tables and lists provided in this brochure are intended to give you several examples of how you might want to enhance your current approaches for defining customer requirements. One key improvement you can make is to simply increase the number of times you touch your customers and allow them to touch you back over a given period of time. By increasing the number of customer touches, you are provided with more opportunities to observe them, listen to them, and measure their levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

You can also employ the use of several mechanisms for staying in touch with the customer. In doing, you can obtain data from a variety of sources, compare the results of such research, and look for commonalities across different data collection mediums. The patterns that appear most often reflect the requirements that your customers consider to be the most important. If you do choose to use a variety of approaches, make sure that you pull them all together into a listening post summary table. This practice will help you make sure that you are investing your customer research time and money in the right places.

Would You Like Some Help?

Over the past 15 or so years, I have been involved with designing internal and external customer satisfaction systems in three different companies - both small and large - in the manufacturing and service arenas. This experience has helped me discover value added, simple ways to set up manual and digital systems for measuring customer satisfaction, creating internal employee surveys that are linked to the annual planning process, reducing customer complaints, and helping an organization better define and exceed the key requirements of their customers. Failing to hear from your customers as often as you should is the primary power restrictor for this power system - finding effective ways to manage and improve the various listening posts that are used is the way to find higher levels of performance.

If you are interested in the customer satisfaction system ideas that I have to offer, send me an e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com. Better yet, give some thought to working further with me to help you improve your internal and external customer satisfaction efforts through my interactive customer system design workshop.

Keep improving! -- Kevin McManus, the Systems Guy

Would You Like to Learn More?

Click on one of the following links to learn even more about Great Systems! and the types of systems improvements I can help you make:

	The Great Systems! home page!!
	"How to Develop a High Performance Work Culture" book
	More articles on performance improvement
	Systems Change: The Key to Getting Better Results
	Do You Need Great Systems!
	Types of Systems I Can Help You Improve

“The only thing I know is that I do not know it all.” -- Socrates