Are you providing unrivaled customer service?

Because the business climate in virtually all industries has become increasingly competitive, and the marketplace continues to change, it is even more important for all employees of an organization to demonstrate responsiveness and respect toward their customers. This means developing a whole new orientation toward customer service.

Business in general is becoming much more customer-focused in this new era of ubiquitous technology that allows for instant personal contact. Companies are recognizing that the degree to which they meet or exceed their customers' expectations will dictate their relative success in the marketplace. In order to be customer-oriented, it is important that your people understand these expectations and perform accordingly. It is also important that your people develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable and empower them to demonstrate customer responsiveness and respect.

Two Points of Focus

Unrivaled Customer Service begins with two points of focus, customer expectations and organizational outcomes. Customer expectations fall into two areas: needs and wants. When a customer's problem is solved, his or her needs are met. When a customer is made to feel good, his or her wants are satisfied. Providing unrivaled customer service means that your people understand both your customers' needs AND wants.

The first step in identifying what customers want and need is to ask them. Conducting a Customer Perception Survey to identify exactly how your customers view you is essential to understanding how to satisfy them in the future. Annual customer surveys are a best practice among the top organizations that taut unrivaled service.

Organizational outcomes fall into three areas: quality in fact, process outcomes, and final results. If your organization is not getting the outcomes it needs to survive and succeed, then you risk being marginalized in the market, or worse yet, going out of business. It is critical that you are able to balance customer expectations with organizational outcomes.

The Internal Customer/Supplier Chain

Experience shows that most external customer disappointments are created by internal process problems. Often, people within the organization are not working together to serve the customer. An effective way to deal with this is to clarify the internal customer/supplier chain. Every employee in your organization has other employees who are their internal customers. Everyone also has internal suppliers, people they depend on for support to do their jobs.

Organizations with a focus on unrivaled service work hard to clarify this internal customer/supplier chain. Every person needs to know precisely who his or her internal customers are, and what they need and want. Imagine everyone in your organization focusing on their internal customer, and working together to serve your external customers.

Knowing what your customers need and want and delivering it are two different things. The critical ingredients in are people and processes. First, your people must have the knowledge and skills to serve your customers effectively. Second, your internal processes must be designed for unrivaled service.

If you are trying to differentiate your organization through unrivaled service, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). Tweed-Weber can help you identify what your customers need and want, not only today, but in the future, so that you can be the consistent market leader.

Understanding Customer Perception is Key to Increased Opportunities

What do you know? Or more important, what should you know? Hearing and clearly understanding the voice of your customer in today’s competitive environment has become an essential and fundamental requirement to future planning. It is ultimately your customer’s voice that matters the most. Successful organizations hear that voice and effectively use it to guide their activities. You may have heard rumors about what your customers are thinking, or even whispers from them along the way, but it is up to you to clearly understand the thoughts and opinions of your customers in order to compete effectively. Your market, and the business environments of your customers, likely have changed significantly over the past few years. The following are just a few examples of crucial information that can be obtained from your customers to see how you can increase your sales volume today.

 

Your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. Does it really matter what you perceive as your organization’s strengths and weaknesses if your customers view them as something entirely different?

 

Competitive information. Recognizing your customers’ opinions about your organization is paramount. Knowing what your customers think about your competition is even better.

 

Unmet customer needs. Your customers are connected to your industry from different angles.

 

Future trends. The state of the economy over the past number of years has been unprecedented. You may have found your industry changing at a pace so fast that it is almost impossible to keep up.

 

Take a moment to consider the importance of customer perceptions on your business and the impact their reality has on your organization. Think also of your organization’s current actions with regard to customer perceptions:

• Can any of the performance issues you face today result from inaccurate awareness of customer perceptions?
• Are your organization’s improvement efforts targeted at addressing critical performance issues as prescribed by your customers?

Many well-run and well-intentioned organizations fall short in these areas. As a result, many improvement efforts target issues that have a relatively low impact on improving customer satisfaction and, therefore, competitive advantage. Management-generated improvement ideas prove effective, but often, and especially in the ongoing stages of organizational improvement, general feelings and intuitions are inadequate triggers for positively affecting customer satisfaction.

  

Many organizations have learned the importance of consistently measuring customer perceptions and satisfaction through a formal customer survey program. A formal process allows customers to share their views about an organization’s performance in a way that is timely and objective, and in today’s market, it is a requirement to staying ahead. Many organizations have expressed a desire to go it alone, but eventually find it challenging to do it in the most effective manner. We have found organizations often ask: 

• Where do I start?
• What method(s) should I use?
• Who should I survey?
• How often should surveys be conducted?
• Who here should implement the surveys?
• How should results be communicated to management?

Our response is simple: we’ll handle it. With nearly three decades of combined experience in market research, our professionals have seen it all and can guide the development and implementation a customer perception survey that will provide an organization with numerous opportunities such as:

• Significant improvement in an organization’s ability to target improvement efforts that will have a real impact on their overall success.
• Improved insight for management and employees into the effects of their actions on customer satisfaction.
• Opportunities to strengthen relationships with key customers.
• Increased business opportunities.

Overall, customer perception surveys can help organizations make strategic decisions, and they provide organizations with a clear understanding of the market’s awareness and perceptions of their products/services. A customer perception survey helps an organization keep its finger on the pulse of a rapidly changing marketplace. 

 

If you’re wondering if a formal customer research program is right for you, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at

www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). The result will be the knowledge you need to make the right decisions to guide your organization into the future. In a world of uncertainty, the ability to clearly focus your organization creates a distinct competitive advantage. No one can guarantee certainty, but market research can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More. 

Happy Employees = Happy Customers?

Recently, a coworker stepped into our “Morning Jolt” – our rendition of a daily morning meeting or catch-up – telling the most horrid story about customer service. After a few laughs and jokes, we discussed how often we find in our clients’ research that bad customer service is linked to employee satisfaction. It’s inevitable. Employee satisfaction is essential to the success of any business.*

In today’s society, most are driven by money and making that money fast, but they fail to look at all aspects involved in achieving success. With every transaction, every product, and every achievement, there is something hidden in the framework – the employees who make those actions a reality. As such, it only makes sense to keep those “little gems” in your company happy, which will aid in your overall business success.

But what exactly makes an employee unhappy? There isn’t always a flashing neon sign saying “I am unhappy with my job.” The reasons are likely to be more subtle – high stress, lack of communication, and/or limited opportunities for growth, just to name a few. In order to be at peak performance, management should focus on these factors to improve the workplace environment, ultimately increasing satisfaction and reducing turnover rates.

In a recent study by Gallup, businesses with higher employee satisfaction also had 86 percent higher customer ratings, 76 percent more success in lowering turnover, 70 percent higher profitability, and 78 percent better safety records.* What do these statistics mean to you? It’s simple: happy employees equal happy customers. They are the scene-setters for your business. They are the ones interacting every day with your most valued assets – your customers.

Every aspect of a company is somehow linked. For example, imagine the inner workings of a business as a spider web, with the spider being the company. Everything revolves around the spider – each thread of the web (department, employee, policy, etc.) is meticulously constructed to provide the utmost support for its daily life. Each intertwines in some shape or form, and any “hiccup” in the daily business functions of the company, regardless of where, could decrease profitability. For instance, when employee satisfaction dips, so does employee performance, affecting everything in the company.

Research from the University of Missouri shows CEOs who pay attention to employee job satisfaction are better equipped to increase customer satisfaction, as well as the volume of customers who intend to do repeat business.** By asking employees their thoughts on key areas in the company, it gives them a voice. It makes them feel like they belong, and that they are shaping the future of the company. This is extremely vital, especially when maintaining satisfaction on all fronts. But how do you go about doing this? It’s easy; conduct an employee perception survey. Employee research gives you the opportunity to identify what is, and what isn’t, working. By honing in on certain areas, such as overall work environment, employee empowerment, and management support, employee research can help change the “web” of your business.

If employee satisfaction research is an area you are interested in exploring, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). Tweed-Weber can help you include your employees and their perceptions as a foundation for your continued success. 

* Adapted from http://www.neumann.edu/academics/divisions/business/journal/review2011/gregory.pdf.

 

** Adapted from http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/1039-workers-happy-customers.html.

Creating Long-Term Sales Growth

Whether you make widgets or sell a service, sales growth is always a major issue affecting your company's long-term success. But if you are like many other organizations, how you go about creating long-term sales growth is a daunting challenge. Sell harder? Advertise more? Modify your product or service? What's the most effective path to take, AND how can you do it without spending an inordinate amount of money?

In order to understand how to go about creating long-term sales growth, it's best to get back to fundamentals. The first fundamental understanding involves general market dynamics. If you want your market to buy more from you than your competitors, you need to give them a reason to do so. Is your price consistently lower? Do your products/services better meet their needs? Do you provide better service during and after the sale? Do you understand their business better, or have you established better relationships with their people?

The market is very difficult to predict in many areas. But one area that is predictable is that the market will, by itself, vote for the company that is perceived as meeting their needs the best. And the market votes for the winner with dollars. 

The second fundamental understanding is more specific to your market(s) and your company. What is the nature of your market, its current and evolving needs, and what is your company's perceived ability to meet those needs relative to your competition?

The reason to gain this fundamental understanding is undeniable. As is common with most of us, our perception of the forces and trends affecting our markets and our companies is based on a combination of issues. It is based on our interpretation of various events and situations over time, as well as our many experiences in dealing with those events. Sometimes our interpretations closely match our market's interpretations, but many times they are off base, either by a little or by a lot. If you believe your perception of the market is closely aligned with the market's perception of you without testing that assumption, then you may be in trouble.

Setting sales growth strategies based primarily on subjective perceptions will probably result in something less than what you desire. Furthermore, if you want to get your people behind a strategy, you need to support it with something better than just your good thinking and intuitive prowess.

Obtaining that information is critical. It will serve as the fundamental basis for a strategy to create long-term sales growth. But how do you go about getting that information and what do you do after you've gotten it? That's where research strategic planning comes in and the use of an outside, integrated consulting firm proves its value in helping out.

Research/Information Gathering

Determining market dynamics and your company's competitive advantage is a result of learning your customers' perceptions of their industries, their current and evolving needs, and their interest in companies that are vying to fill those needs (including yours). Normally, this is accomplished through intensive surveying using a number of proven methods. This is best done by an expert, third-party consulting firm. By combining this information with internally generated data, (e.g., sales history, financial performance, etc.) the dynamics of the market and your position within it can be viewed and discussed objectively by your management team. As a result, a consensus can be achieved as to the starting point for determining the sales growth strategy that is right for your company.

Long-Term Sales Growth Strategy Development

Determining the correct sales strategy for your company is the result of combining the work done previously with the fundamental understanding of general market dynamics mentioned earlier. The market embraces the company that meets their needs better than the others. Determining your company's long-term sales strategy will involve defining what those needs are and what you can do to stand-out in meeting those needs in the marketplace.

Think about the affect the activities described previously would have on your company's ability to create long-term sales growth. Your people would see the logic that was involved and be more enthusiastic in supporting and contributing to the company's new and/or revitalized direction.

If you are trying to establish long-term sales growth, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). Tweed-Weber can help you include your market(s) and their perceptions as a foundation for your continued success.

Problem Solving and Continuous Improvement

The most important tools you will use to improve the total quality of your organization are the problem solving and continuous improvement process that your organization has adopted. Notice that there is a clear distinction between problem solving and continuous improvement. Each process has a specific definition and a specific application, and it is imperative that you use the right process in the right situations.

Problem Solving Defined
Webster's defines a problem as “a question, matter, situation, or person that is perplexing or difficult.” That definition is fine for grammatical purposes, but it doesn’t help us much with problem solving in an organizational environment. A more functional definition of a business-related problem is “a deviation from the normal or expected for which the cause is unknown and for which one would like to determine the cause and find a solution.” Let’s look at an example to clarify our definition. Suppose, at the end of work today, you get in your car, you put the key in the ignition and turn it. The normal or expected result would be that the engine would start and you would be able to drive home. Today, when you turn the key, nothing happens. That’s a problem. A deviation from the normal or the expected. Do you want to find the cause and determine a solution? Of course. Something happened to cause the problem. Some kind of change took place. By finding what changed, you will find the cause of the problem. The cause of a problem is always found in some kind of change. Find the change, and you have found the cause. Put the situation back to the way it was, and you have solved the problem.

Continuous Improvement Defined
Continuous improvement is defined as “the ongoing process of making small changes in order to improve output or performance.” Continuous improvement is the opposite of problem solving. You are purposefully trying to change the normal or the expected in a positive direction. You are trying to make a change in the system that will cause a change in the outcome. Let’s use the automobile example again. Let’s say you are averaging 19 miles per gallon of gasoline, and you want to increase the fuel efficiency of your car. You begin to look for ways to improve your mileage. Each time you come up with an idea, you make a change in the process of how you maintain or drive your car. This change causes improvement. A series of small changes can result in a big improvement and give you increased fuel efficiency.

There are many different models for problem solving and continuous improvement, but the following are examples of the seven-step processes that your organization can choose to adopt, which are highly effective.

The Seven-Step Problem Solving Process

1. State the problem. What is the deviation from the standard?
2. Specify the problem. Describe what the problem IS and IS NOT. The more specific you make your problem description, the closer you will be to finding the cause.
3. Find the differences between the IS and the IS NOT.
4. Brainstorm possible causes. What are some changes that could have caused this problem?
5. Test the most likely cause. Which of these possible causes is most likely to be the cause of this problem?
6. Validate the cause. What can we do to prove that the most likely cause is the real cause of the problem?
7. Develop the solution. What action(s) can we take to undo the change that caused this problem?

The Seven-Step Continuous Improvement Process

1. Select the condition to improve.
2. Define how to measure the condition. Before you can improve a condition, you must be able to measure it.
3. Set a target.
4. Gather facts to define the condition as it is now.
5. Generate improvement ideas.
6. Select, test, and adopt improvement ideas.
7. Establish, document, and discipline new procedures.

Problem solving and continuous improvement are very similar. In both cases, you are trying to understand how change affects results. In problem solving, you are trying to find the change that caused a negative deviation from the standard. In continuous improvement, you are trying to cause a positive deviation from the normal by introducing change. In either case, it is essential that these processes become standardized or “institutionalized.” When these processes are institutionalized,

• everyone on your team is taking the same approach to solving problems and improving processes;
• everyone is speaking the same language;
• anyone from your organization (even if they are not members of your team) can study the solutions or improvement steps you are planning and understand how you arrived at them; and,
• people feel empowered because they are using a method that has been sanctioned by the organization.

Most importantly, you will give your business a competitive advantage when the people in your organization genuinely recognize that problem solving and continuous improvement are simultaneously opportunities and obligations. The opportunity is the empowerment that comes from having a tool, recognized throughout your organization, for solving a problem or improving a process. The obligation is the requirement that the tools be used to improve the total quality of your organization.

If problem solving and continuous improvement could benefit your business, our research and strategic planning professionals can help you. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com, and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). We’re ready to work for you in a way that will enhance the way your business operates today and in the future.

How do you give yourself an advantage in the marketplace?

Market differentiation. Have you ever wondered how to create that? There are five commonly recognized sources of market advantage. It is not necessary to use all of them in order to distinguish your company in its markets. Any one is enough. However, by achieving differentiation in one source and superiority in another, you further ensure your business's continued success.

No one source is, in and of itself, better than another. Let's explore each of the five sources and their relationship to your company.

Low Price
A company can gain and sustain market advantage in its markets by focusing on and achieving a low price strategy. In order to do this, however, there conditions must be present:

• The company must be a low cost provider. The reason is simple: any company that tries to be low price without being low cost for any extended period will eventually become unprofitable and run out of cash.
• The company must always be low price. This is essential because the market must come to rely on the low price the organization charges for its services. If the organization is only low price with particular programs, when it needs to generate sales, or when it is trying to capture market share, the marketplace will be confused and will not respond.
• The company must position itself in the market as the low price provider. It must consistently and repeatedly tell the market through its promotional mix that its prices are the lowest it will ever find.

Product Differentiation
A company can gain and sustain market advantage by clearly differentiating its products and services from those provided by its competitors. There are several ways in which a company can differentiate its products:

• Innovation/Unique Characteristic: by providing products and services that are highly innovative or possess characteristics unique to a market.
• High Perceived Quality: by providing products and services with high perceived quality.
• Availability/Response Time: by having its products and services readily available to its customers, thereby demonstrating a significantly shorter response time than its competitors.
• Promotion: by promoting its products and services in a way that the market perceives them as being noticeably different than other comparable products. 

Unrivaled Service
A company can gain and sustain market advantage by differentiating, from its competition, the way it sells its products and the support services it provides. Some specific examples of service differentiation include:

• being highly and consistently responsive to customers and their wants and needs.
• delivering products with an unexpectedly high degree of reliability.
• treating the customer with respect...all of the time.

Niching
A company can gain and sustain market advantage by focusing on a very narrow market and becoming recognized as the provider within that market. This focus can take place on a "macro" basis or on a "micro" basis. When a company decides to pursue a niche market on a macro basis, it focuses its organizational resources on:

• a specific geographical area
• a particular customer type
• a highly defined line of products or services

When a company decides to purse a niche market on a macro basis, it focuses its resources on selling its services to specifically targeted prospects and/or increasing its penetration within deliberately chosen key customer accounts.

Relationships Leading to "Partnering"
There is a general rule in business that says, "All things being equal, people would rather buy from a friend." There comes a point, though, when that is no longer true--when other performance factors (e.g. quality, service, price) are not adequate to justify continuing to give business to the friend.

With this rule in mind, you can gain and sustain market advantage by building superior relationships with your customers (and prospects). These relationships can exist on two different levels. At the first level, you have worked hard to identify and meet the needs of your customers. This trust and familiarity has enabled your customers to view you as a "friend," a friend with whom they have a great relationship.

At the second level, you have been able to leverage your relationship into a true partnership--not in a legal sense, but rather one in which the customers view you as being essential to their lives. When a partnership level has been achieved, you are capable of not only meeting your customers' needs, but anticipating them to a point where you are able to create mutually beneficial business opportunities. When this level of partnering occurs, your competitors are at a significant disadvantage because they experience a "barrier to entry" that is all but impenetrable.

Tweed-Weber's research makes it easy to get the information you need to give yourself a clear advantage in the marketplace. You can call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com, and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and on Twitter (@TweedWeber). Whether your research project is large or small, you can be assured that Tweed-Weber has the resources, skills, and experience to provide the information and results you need.