Exceeding Customer Expectations - A Seven Point Plan

Robert Craven wonders if customers really are in charge when it comes to dealing with organisations. And here he offers his seven point plan to make sure the customer is 'king'.

 

The seven-point  'Customer Is King' Plan is a step-by-step process for getting your business to see itself through your customers' eyes and to start to make sure that you can design a business that delivers on its promise and delights its customers - this is a systematic way to develop your business. 

The seven points of the customer experience plan are as follows:

1. Redefine your business as a problem-solver
2. Understand the real scope of your business
3. Getting under each customer's skin! 
4. Stand out to be outstanding
5. Develop a strategy to define your position
6. Calculate just how much a customer is worth to you
7. Select your weapons

The seven-point plan is all about great questions.  For instance:

• Who are your customers?
• What do they want?
• What is the 'promise'?
• How well do you deliver the 'promise'?

#1 REDEFINE YOUR BUSINESS AS A PROBLEM-SOLVER

To get to the heart of what your business does, you need to redefine yourself. What Problem Are You Solving? What's The Real Problem?

Sometimes you need to change how you see yourself - change the perception that you are using to look at the world.  To understand the customer experience and to take advantage of it, redefine yourself as a problem-solver! 

If you put yourself in the role of 'problem-solver' for your clients, you start to look for problems to solve.  Rather than looking for sales, you look for the problems that the client is facing.  By focusing on the customers' problems a number of things happen:

• You start to see things through the customer's eyes
• You start to see to real issues that the customer faces
• You are able to have more empathy as you try to see what help the client might need
• You develop a stronger relationship because you are not constantly wearing your 'sales hat'
• You are developing long-term rather than short-term relationships.

By running your business as if it is a problem-solver, suddenly you have a significant role to play for the customer.  Your role is that of figuring out what your customers are trying to do and to help them to do it.  Wearing this different pair of spectacles, the world takes on a different shape.

Action Point

Answer the following for your business:

• Why do people come to your business?
• Why do people buy your product/service?
• Why do they buy it from you?
• What problems do they have that you are trying to solve?
• What would their ideal solution be?  (What should they be saying, thinking and doing as a result of visiting your business)
• What is your ideal solution?  (What should they be saying, thinking and doing as a result of visiting your business)
• For a moment, forget about the need to make a sale....  If you use the mindset of a problem-solver, what else could you be doing to make life easier for your customer? 

#2 UNDERSTAND THE REAL SCOPE OF YOUR BUSINESS

Most of us regularly undersell ourselves.  As well as underselling ourselves, we regularly misunderstand how we are perceived; there is often a gap between what we think we do and what the customer sees. 

In a personality, a gap between your own self-image (of how you present yourself to others), and how you are perceived by others can result in serious mental disorders.  These may result in you getting locked up!  In a business, such a gap results in dissatisfied customers and poor performance.

So

• Do you ever get carried away with the features of your product and forget that the customer may not be on the same wavelength as you? 
• Do you ask enough questions of your customers? 
• Do you really listen to your customers and what they want?

If you have too narrow a vision of what you offer to customers then you will undersell yourself, you will miss opportunities to develop the relationship.  If, on the other hand you understand the scope and depth of how you can help, then you will discover new opportunities to work with and help your customer.

Expand the limits of how you define your business.  Consider how you could expand into new or different products/service lines and/or new or different markets.  Think laterally.  Consider the advantages and disadvantages of becoming broader in your scope or becoming narrower/deeper in your scope.

#3 GET UNDER EACH CUSTOMER'S SKIN! 

Some more crunch questions:

• Who's the product for? 
• What or who is your target market? 
• Why do people buy the product?  Why do they buy from you?
• What does it feel like to be one of your customers? 
• Do you delight your customers? 
• What would you have to do to be known for 'legendary customer service'?  What would the effect be?
• What would happen if you sacked your bottom 50% of customers right now?
• Could you work out twenty ways to get closer to the other 50% of your customers?  Could you get a bigger share of their wallets?
• Can you identify or create the 'ambassadors' for your business?
• How can you get your customers' permission to sell to them?

Getting under the skin of your customer is no easy task.  Nearly every business is trying to find out what makes their customers tick.  Endless customer surveys by market research companies try to figure out how to sell more product to the poor unsuspecting(?) customers. 

There are various options for the research, some traditional, some more innovative:

• Customer Focus Groups
• Run a survey on the Net via a discussion forum
• Use a student - get a student to do a so-called university research project
• Run a private dinner/event for opinion formers
• While writing an article for a trade paper you can interview your customers and feature their comments in the article
• Run a conference or a seminar
• Run a special Suppliers' Seminar
• Run a Customers' Day

Why Should You Be Doing This? Somehow you've got to find ways of being more than just in tune with your customers.  To get ahead of your competitors you need to understand what it is that your customers want and to demonstrate that you understand what they want and need, and be able to do it better than your competitors.

Action Point

Jot down the names of your ten best customers. Then, contact each one, and ask

• What do you really like about the way we do business?
• What drives you mad about the way we do business?
• If you ran my business what five changes would you make and why?
• What opportunities am I missing?
• If we are going to grow the business, what aspects must we keep and what must we lose?
• What could we do that would make you want to buy more from us?
• What do you think our other customers think about us?  Who do you see as our main competitors and how are they better or worse than us?

This exercise will give you plenty to think about.

#4 TO STAND OUT IS TO BE OUTSTANDING

If you are the same as the rest then why should customers bother to buy from you? You ignore the one-liner at your peril!  Wake up and smell the coffee!

In a world where competition seems to be everywhere, you need to separate yourself from the rest. 

If you compete on price, only the customer will win - the company with the lowest prices (i.e. biggest buying power) will get the business.  This is no place for the timid.

So What! If you try to be the same as the rest, a 'me-too' business, it is incredibly difficult to survive in the long-run.  After all, the only way you can differentiate yourself when several businesses are selling exactly the same product will be on price.  And if you differentiate yourself on price then it becomes inevitable that you enter a price war - customers will chase the cheapest prices - those businesses with the biggest market share (and economies of scale) will be able command better prices from their suppliers.  As a result, these competitors will be able to pass on those savings to customers while maintaining healthier profit margins than their competition (probably, you).  You will end up cutting your profit margins, probably until you go out of business. 

Opinion or maybe even a fact!  Brand preference has always been a function of perception.  People prefer the brand that they think/believe will give them what they want; marketing is usually a battle of perceptions more than a battle of products.  In today's world you have to try much harder to create (and maintain) the perceived difference.

If you want to be more successful at creating and maintaining the perceived difference of your product, then the customers' experience should be made to be unique in tangible, physical ways.  A corollary to this is that if your service is intangible then a powerful way of branding yourself is by creating tangible (and ideally memorable) experiences.

#5 DEVELOP A STRATEGY TO DEFINE YOUR POSITION

Positioning is at the heart of strategy formulation for your business.  It is one of the hardest parts of the 're-inventing' your business scenario that is being considered.  For many business people, it is relatively easy to understand what positioning is and how to do it. The difficulty comes in the execution, the doing bit.

Positioning is all about understanding the map of where (and how and against whom) you are competing.  Positioning is a difficult process.  Positioning is a creative, subjective process.  Positioning helps you understand why you are different or points to how you could emphasis your difference.  Positioning suggests a version of the territory; it is a map. 

#6 CALCULATE JUST HOW MUCH A CUSTOMER IS WORTH TO YOU

Unless you know the true value of a customer (to your business) then how can you decide how much you are prepared to spend to acquire one?

Customers are often worth more to us than we realise.  This is particularly true in the case of services. You need to know how much it costs to acquire a clients and how much the typical client is worth to you. Only then can you decide how much you are prepared to spend to acquire a new client!

#7 SELECT YOUR WEAPONS

You can only think about how to spend your marketing budget after you know who you are trying to reach and what you are trying to say to them

And finally...  

Unless you know what you are trying to communicate and to whom and why, then you cannot effectively choose the most appropriate tools.  Only think about which tools (or weapons) you might use when you have figured out exactly what you are trying to communicate, to whom, and against whom.

You cannot start to choose your marketing weapons until you have clarity about how you are trying to attract and with which method.  Most marketing campaigns start with a budget and then select tools and then choose the message.  This is a totally upside-down way of looking at the problem (unless you enjoy spending other people's money!).

The ‘Customer Is King’ seven-point plan is a practical way of marrying the customer experience with the marketing of your business. If marketing is the ‘promise’ then operations is the delivery of the promise.

In a world where so many products tend to look similar (similar prices, features, staff, hardware, software) then the company that over-delivers on its promise… and understands why the customer wants what he/she want… and is able to communicate this… will be the winner!

About Robert Craven

Robert Craven is a keynote speaker and author of the business best-sellers 'Kick-Start Your Business' and 'Customer Is King'. He has recently been described as 'one of the UK’s leading marketing specialists' and the 'entrepreneurship guru'. He runs The Directors’ Centre, helping growing businesses to grow.
For further information, contact Robert Craven on 01225 851044. (rc@directorscentre.com) www.directorscentre.com

Robert Craven ©2006

publication details

First published in Customer Management, Vol 14 Issue 4, July July/Aug 2006.