Purpose
Ensure the needs and issues of all your Customers are clearly defined and understood, and that your people are systematically finding new ways to serve them better.
Companies that have developed a very clear sense of purpose in their organisation appear to have established a strong focus in a number of the following areas:
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Build Common Purpose They develop a corporate passion for understanding and delighting the customer |
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Work in Partnership They actively partner their customers in serving their customer’s customer |
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Focus on the Customer They strive to drive all aspects of the development of processes, products and services through a clear customer focus |
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Measure Customer Impact They reflect the importance of the customer in measurement, reward systems, policy and process |
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Drive Customer Satisfaction They continually seek to anticipate and lead customers' expectations |
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Care for the Environment They understand the wider implications of their work, and endeavour to neutralise any negative effects |
To understand these in more detail please click on the relevant image above, or scan through the explanations below.
Build
Common Purpose
Develop a
corporate passion for understanding and delighting the customer
How clear is the purpose of your organisation?
Do your people clearly share in a common purpose with your organisation, and do they actively seek to further that purpose? Or is there a degree of confusion as to who the organisation is there to serve?
Principle
Developing within your people a clear and consistent understanding of exactly what the company is trying to do. This would include clarifying who the customers of the company are, what they do, and how the company provides a service to them.
It is important to avoid a purely mechanical understanding, as this will become obsolete as the customer’s needs develop, and is likely to result in a task focus on the part of your people. However, developing a service oriented understanding is more complex and time consuming, and will inevitably require close customer contact.
Benefits
Developing a clear, common, service oriented purpose provides a number of benefits, some of which are:
- work becomes more fulfilling when people are clear on the purpose of it
- common interpretations of what is required assist teamwork and reduce the conflict that can otherwise arise
- a shared understanding of the opportunities for serving the customer enables the organisation to empower its people to provide creative solutions to customer issues
Approach
Given the complexity and options inherent in the customer relationship, common purpose is difficult (if not impossible) to achieve through words alone. To develop an appropriate degree of understanding often requires close contact between customer and company staff. This helps to build real relationships and breakdown unhelpful paradigms.
Concepts that are relevant here include:
- A customer intimacy strategy for staff, including customer visits etc.
- Presentations on the customer's business and issues
- Why-how charting of customer needs and the reasons for them
- Supply chain mapping, including the part your customer plays in it
- Customer involvement in workshops and planning sessions
Work in
Partnership
Actively
partner your customers in serving their customers
Who are the customers of your customer? What is critical to how your customer serves them, and what is your part in that?
Is there scope for working together with your customer more closely in thinking through the way that you can jointly ensure their customer gets the best service possible?
Principle
Seeking to work with your customers in serving their customers begins to develop a purely contractual relationship into a common focus partnership. Without a focus on the customer’s customer the objectives of the supplier and the customer become distinctly separate, and tend to centre around specifications and terms-and-conditions. These different perspectives engender a degree of distrust and make teamwork more difficult.
Seeking the common goal of serving the same end customer provides the opportunity to work together in a creative enterprise, each finding new ways and new opportunities to contribute.
Benefits
As outlined above, the chief benefit of working in partnership is the teamwork basis that develops from working with your customer to a common purpose.
There are however other benefits, which include:
- Greater understanding of each other and the possibilities therein
- The opportunity to orientate your customer to a degree of dependence
- Foresight on the upcoming opportunities and issues before they arise
- Better focus of your own people on what is important
- A clear focus on service over product
Approach
Essentially the approach is one of being available and seeking to be involved at the outset. But if true partnership is to develop this must not in any way be a sham or a show. Partnership is built through service. There has to be a clear willingness to invest in the relationship without any clear picture of what can be gained from it. The customer will only involve a supplier when he has built sufficient confidence in the suppliers motives - when he has developed the understanding that you ‘make money to serve’, and not vice versa.
The concepts that are relevant to this principle include:
- Customer workshops
- Specialist (technical) consultancy resources
- Supply chain mapping & Porter’s model
Focus on the
Customer
Strive to
drive all aspects of the development of processes, products and
services through a clear customer focus
To what extent is your business designed to meet the needs of your customers?
To what extent is the voice of the customer used to make changes not only to product, but to all aspects of your relationship with them?
Principle
It is a common concept to design products to meet the needs of the customer. But this principle goes beyond that, initially to the concept of designing the ‘service’ to meet the needs of the customer, and ultimately to designing operating processes to target current and future customer needs.
All activities that are not clearly focussed on meeting the customers current and future needs are inherently wasteful. Focusing on the customer is concerned with literally evaluating the design of your whole business against the value that it adds to your customer (both currently and potentially)
Benefits
Competitive performance is borne out of being able to supply increased value to your customer at reduced cost to yourself. Focusing all your activities on the customer, and designing them to efficiently meet his need addresses both of these issues.
On the one hand it drives and maintains an in depth understanding of customer needs and opportunities, in order to focus the business on these. On the other hand it challenges inefficient and wasteful activities that increase your costs to little advantage.
The result should be increased effectiveness and efficiency.
Approach
There are many valuable tools and techniques for developing innovative and successful product solutions to customer needs and opportunities, and you probably employ or contract people who are familiar with them.
Those same tools and techniques are often just as relevant to the design of your ‘service’ and operational processes, but the link is often not made.
The following tools and techniques are especially relevant:
- Quality Function Deployment (a matrix based approach for linking processes to objectives in order to assist in their evaluation and design)
- Flowcharting (a graphical method of exploring sequences of activities)
- Conjoint analysis (a method of understanding customer needs)
- Problem Solving Tools (Ishikawa, Brainstorming etc.)
Measure Customer
Impact
Reflect the
importance of the customer in measurement, reward systems, policy
and process
Is the impact of your business on your customer actively managed?
To what extent are all the contacts between your businesses (‘moments of truth’) measured and consciously influenced to maximise the quality of your service to your customer?
Principle
Many companies treat the service they provide to their customers as an ‘open loop’. They assume that it has the effect on the customer that they designed and planned it to have, especially if they hear nothing to the contrary. If they hear a complaint they might well respond with a change in approach, but the net effect of this is that improvement only happens in response to a known problem, and service therefore ‘bumps along the bottom’
The alternative is to ensure that there is ongoing feedback for all aspects of your service to your customers, good and bad, and that this feedback is actively used to continuously improve your service (‘closed loop’)
Benefits
‘Closed loop’ feedback on your customer service enables you to improve good service into excellent service - to compete with the best of your competitors rather than the worst.
Also, working at this end of customer aspirations enables you to be sensitive to their future, and to begin to shape their preferred solutions well before they become expectations. In this way your chosen approach to service becomes the basis of the complaints levelled at your competitors, and not vice versa.
Finally, the discipline of seeking feedback ensures that all aspects of your business are kept on their toes, and take full responsibility for serving your customer.
Approach
Detailed feedback on each and every transaction with each and every customer is not really an option. The burden on the customer would be far too great. But using this as an excuse to avoid seeking feedback altogether should also not be an option.
Correct use of sampling techniques, combined with innovative and sensitive ways of seeking opinion, preferably as part of an ongoing personal relationship with customer staff, should enable any business to gain an insight into how it can continue to improve its service.
It is important however to remember that your objective is to look for clues to learn from, and not rigorous proof of your unremitting excellence.
Drive Customer
Satisfaction
Continually
seek to anticipate and lead customers' expectations
How does your performance in satisfying customers stack up?
How does your performance at customer satisfaction compare with your competitors, or with the best in other industries, either nationally or globally? And what are you doing about this?
Principle
The European Foundation for Quality Management uses a well regarded model to assess excellence in awarding its prestigious EQA prize. The model is split into nine areas, and by far the most important of these, representing 20% of the marks, is Customer Satisfaction.
The highest marks are reserved for those companies which represent national and global paragons of customer satisfaction.
Benefits
The PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) database is a study of over 3000 business units. Through analysing its data it has concluded that the degree of focus on specific customer needs and the fulfilment of those needs relative to competitors - the two main factors in customer satisfaction? - have a dramatic impact on financial performance. (see the diagram on the right)
Approach
The best approach to driving customer satisfaction is a committed (almost obsessional) focus on the four foregoing principles.
This principle is about viewing your efforts on the other four principles against the efforts that your competitors invest in the same. It is about seeing those comparisons in a local, national, and global context. And it is about seeking to be the best in all three.
Care for
the Environment
Understand
the wider implications of your work, and endeavour to neutralise
any negative effects
What impact does your business have on the environment?
Do you actively seek to ensure that the world (in an environmental or ‘green’ sense) is no worse off as a result of your activities? Or do you go further than this an seek to have a net positive effect - perhaps redressing past sins?
Principle
In the widest sense our customers are everybody our business affects. Our ‘purpose’ should in some way reflect the wider potential of our business, as well as the specific focus our company has chosen in the ‘short’ term.
‘Green’ issues have been very much on the agenda recently, and are likely to remain so. The earth cannot sustain indefinitely activities which only consume and pollute its resources. If we really seek to add value we have to consider whether that really is our net effect overall, and long term. And this doesn't just mean chemically - it also means socially, ethically and spiritually.‘For evil to triumph all that is required is for good men to do nothing’
G.K. Chesterton
Benefits
Apart from a better legacy for generations to come, and a personal sense of having done the right thing, there are other more immediate benefits.
Certainly some of those businesses who have failed to think about these issues are now facing legal and legislative costs that are doing significant damage to their business, and this trend looks set to continue. Responsibilities that may have been though of as trivial 20 years ago are now part of multi-million pound legal battles - so, what of the decisions we are currently making that future generations may classify as negligent?
There is also a growing trend of seeking to work with and invest in those businesses that take a responsible attitude to their surroundings.
Approach
There are now a number of schemes for environmental assessment and control - including large computer based programmes for actively managing the risks in your business.
There is a British Standard on the subject - BS 7750
In addition there is currently a growth in organisations that look at the ethical and spiritual impacts of businesses. A number of papers have been written on the subject of business ethics, and there is even a magazine that addresses the subject, called ‘Ethos’.
© Tesseract Management Systems Ltd 2003
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