Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor

USAA insures military members and their families. It does this really well: Its customer retention rate is 97.8%.

The company’s call centers are critical to serving customers located around the world. Its call center reps spend six months in training before answering customers’ calls. They eat MREs (meals ready to eat), find out what it feels like to wear Kevlar vests and flak helmets, and receive deployment letters to get them thinking about what such letters mean to the families they affect.

USAA understands its customers’ needs. It was founded by 25 Army officers in 1922; almost a quarter of its management and new hires have served in the military. It has ranked number 1 or 2 every year for the four years of the BusinessWeek and J.D. Powers Customer Service Champions list. No other company has come close to matching its performance. (“USAA’s Battle Plan,” Jena McGregor, BusinessWeek, February 18, 2010)

Mobile customers require mobile banking and insurance solutions. With USAA, a service member can use his iPhone to send a photo of his check to the USAA bank and it is deposited in his account. He can find out his balance with a text message. Later this year, he should be able to email or text-message money to family and friends for immediate deposit. He can use his phone to initiate a claim from the scene of an accident. If he’s looking at new…

Serving Customers through Shopper Marketing

Shopper marketing is a relatively new concept that is changing how consumer package goods companies and retailers market their goods. According to the UT Shopper Marketing Forum, available here, “shopper marketing refers to understanding consumers while they are in shopper mode, regardless of the brand, category, or channel and leveraging these insights to create better shopping experiences, superior brand equity, and more loyal shoppers.”

The catalyst for shopper marketing seems to be the need to spend marketing resources more efficiently and effectively. As a result, companies and retailers “are shifting millions of dollars within their marketing budgets from traditional media to shopper focused and specifically in-store initiatives”—yet another nail in traditional media’s coffin.

In addition to consumer goods companies and retailers, shopper marketing involves brokers, advertising agencies, data management companies, and consultants. It affects market research, segmentation models, collaboration programs, pricing structures, packaging, demonstrations, displays, store layout, and floor level execution.

According to IndustryWeek, 73% of consumer product goods manufacturers and 86% of retailers rank shopper marketing as the number one activity that delivers meaningful return on investment (“Shopper Marketing Is a Supply Chain Partner’s Next Marketing Frontier,” Marcel M. Zondag, January 18, 2010). They are embracing shopper marketing because the Internet and social media are creating a new type of customer who is more particular about shopping and because of its ability to reach more people. As the article notes, “whereas 35 million…

Lessons Learned from Dell Hell

In the mid-1990s, I helped a Dell facility apply for the Texas Quality Award. It had world-class manufacturing processes that allowed it to build desktop computers from specs on paper to a customized computer ready for shipment in four hours. They called it “moving at Dell speed.” Asked how it measured performance, everyone pointed to Dell’s stock price, which was climbing so fast the company did 2-for-1 stock splits six times from 1995 to 1999.

It strengths obscured its weaknesses, one of which was the lack of systematic approaches to engaging customers who were not corporate buyers. Dell assumed that the orders it received every day told it all it needed to know about its customers. It took orders. It didn’t listen. And that had to change.

In the introduction to Mark Benioff’s book, Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry, Michael Dell, founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell, describes IdeaStorm, an online community forum the company uses to get ideas from its customers. As of today, customers have contributed more than 13,000 ideas through IdeaStorm, which were promoted by other customers nearly 710,000 times, with more than 88,000 comments. Dell has implemented 390 of its customers’ ideas.

In truth, IdeaStorm is a response to “Dell Hell,” a post written by blogger Jeff Jarvis in 2005 that became a lightning rod for…

My Personal Baldrige: Customers

You have a job because you provide something that someone else needs. Could be external customers. Often it’s other departments in the organization. Maybe it’s your manager. Whoever your customers are, if you serve them well, you’re making your organization more effective and your contributions less dispensable.

First, a caveat: You can’t personalize Baldrige without a little learning and effort. Second caveat: The Baldrige model is not designed to prescribe an individual’s role, so we’re taking some liberties in doing so. We welcome your feedback on whether you think we’re on track.

As the Baldrige Criteria state, “performance and quality are judged by an organization’s customers.” Your performance and quality are judged by your customers. That being the case, you need to know who your customers are, what they require, and how you can meet and exceed those requirements.

Here are steps you can take to apply customer-driven excellence to your job:

1. Identify your customers. Your boss is a customer. Coworkers are often customers. Other departments may be customers. Look at who gets the output of your work—they are your customers—then consider who is served when your work comes together with the work of others in the organization. Which external customers use the output of this work?
2. Determine what each customer/customer group requires. Customer requirements fall into four categories: quality, delivery, cost, and service. Examples of customer requirements include accurate and complete (quality), on time (delivery),…