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Develop a customer-focussed organisation
We come across a lot of businesses whose Mission statement incorporates specific aspirations about delivering value and solutions to customers needs, but whose web site and whose sales and service processes are strongly driven by product.
There is a risk that if you publish that you are customer driven, but in reality are driven by product sales, your customers will soon spot the anomalies, because you will invariably be unable to deliver the level of service and support promised and expected.
This is not a good strategy for long term growth.
Most businesses have processes for dealing with dissatisfied or complaining customers. Many have reviews and analysis of numbers of complaints and set themselves targets as a measure of how well they ‘satisfy’ their customers. But precious few have similar process to analyse and identify the underlying reasons for customer complaints and quickly change their processes to improve service delivery. That is one measure of how committed any business is to delivering real customer service.
And don’t think that becoming wholly customer driven is a cost rather than a plan to improve revenues. Just look at the case of SAS Airlines and Jan Carlzon, who through a strategy of being wholly customer driven, turned a loss of $8m into a profit of $71m in 12 months!
Carlzon famously said: “We used to fly airplanes. Now we fly people”.
