All Posts Tagged With: "customer focus"
Publisher Wins Baldrige Award
I grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: baptized and confirmed, eight years in parochial school, Sunday School and church every Sunday, graduated from Concordia College in St. Paul and taught for four years in a Missouri Synod elementary school. Concordia is a popular Missouri Synod name: The Concordia University System includes ten colleges and universities, many of the synod’s churches use the Concordia name, and the publishing arm of the synod is the Concordia Publishing House (CPH), which is the only non-healthcare recipient of the 2011 Baldrige Award.
It’s a well-deserved honor. CPH has 247 employees and revenues of $35 million and provides more than 8,000 products to members of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It excels at customer service, starting with 98% customer satisfaction scores, exceeding the benchmark for U.S. call centers. It’s Customer Call Center has been considered a “Center of Excellence” by Purdue University each of the last three years.
Innovation helps CPH build customer relationships. Its Center for Client Retention collects and analyzes data from customers of competitors, categorizing sales and customer trends in more than 50 different ways to correlate product sales and types of customers. Its Emerging Products team studies how to use new technologies to…
8Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCreating a Customer Culture
It’s always refreshing to hear a company that excels at serving customers describe its approach, especially when that company is in an industry that generally treats its customers like cattle.
Hawaiian Airlines has ranked among the leaders in customer service for years and is routinely ranked first by the US Department of Transportation for on-time performance and fewest cancellations. Charles Nardello oversees aircraft, flight, and customer service operations at Hawaiian Airlines. In a recent article on the HBR Blog Network, he discusses how the airline improved operational performance while maintaining service excellence, citing three things a company must do well “to maintain an unbeatable level of operational excellence: (1) Get very close to their customer; (2) Benchmark against itself on a consistent basis; and, (3) Empower employees to address the unexpected.”
A customer focus permeates Hawaiian Airlines. “For every decision we make, from the most basic to the complex, the customer always comes first—they are the driver of our decision-making and strategic planning,” writes Nardello. A culture that brings the customer perspective to every decision acts far differently than a company where customers are an afterthought or are only considered when addressing customer issues.
Hawaiian Airlines has an independent agency survey customers every month…
14Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedDoes Your Company Create Real Value?
According to a recent survey of 50,000 consumers in 14 countries including the US, 70% of the brands we interact with could disappear entirely and we wouldn’t notice it.
The survey also found that 20% of the brands we interact with have a positive impact on our lives.
Which list would your company make? (You can see two Top 10 brand lists at the end of this article.)
Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Labs, explains the difference: “Did this brand make you fitter, wiser, smarter, closer? Did it improve your personal outcomes? Did it improve your community outcomes? Did it pollute the environment? We’re trying to get beyond ‘did this company make a slightly better product’ to the more resonant, meaningful question: Did this brand actually impact your life in a tangible, lasting, and positive way?”
I’ve written before about corporate social responsibility and how companies are embracing it to gain a competitive advantage (here and here), which is one part of the conclusions drawn by the Meaningful Brands survey and Haque. The other part is that companies are creating enduring brands by creating value for their customers, making them “fitter, wiser, smarter, closer,” to use Haque’s description.
This is where integrating the Baldrige model…
10Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Model: How do you engage customers to serve their needs and build relationships?
Item 3.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you support your customers and build relationships with them. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Identifying customer and market requirements
- Identifying and innovating products and services to enter new markets, attract new customers, and expand relationships with existing customers
- Enabling customers to seek information and customer support, conduct business with you, and provide feedback
- Determining and deploying the key support requirements for each customer group
- Determining which market customers and markets to pursue
- Using customer, market, and product/service information to improve marketing, build a more customer-focused culture, and innovate
- Build customer relationships and market share
- Manage customer complaints to resolve them promptly and address the causes of the complaints
Best practices to consider:
- Since people in the organization deal with customers daily, they assume that they know what customers require but have never validated their assumptions, which is a critical first step to improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- New product and service development processes involve customers in evaluating ideas and features.
- The organization also involves customers in identifying support requirements, which are then deployed to all employees who interact with customers, with measures of…
Baldrige Model: How do you obtain information from your customers?
The Baldrige Model: How do you obtain information from your customers?
Item 3.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how your organization listens to your customers. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
Listening to each key customer group and market segment across the entire customer life cycle, to former and potential customers, and to customers of competitors to obtain actionable information
Following up with customers on product/service quality, customer support, and transactions to acquire immediate and actionable feedback
Determining customer satisfaction, engagement, and dissatisfaction
Using data and information about customer satisfaction, engagement, and dissatisfaction to exceed their expectations and improve loyalty
Obtaining information about your customers’ satisfaction with your organization, products, services, and support relative to their satisfaction with your competitors and other organizations providing similar products and services
Best practices to consider:
Using established processes, the organization knows exactly what each of its customer groups and/or market segments requires and communicates that knowledge throughout the organization.
Listening posts are established for all customer groups and segments with processes for collecting, analyzing, and sharing the information from those posts.
Follow-up with customers typically includes relationship and transaction surveys and frequently involves…
16May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Do Your Customers Require?
It’s a fundamental question that demands a profound knowledge of who your customers are and what each individual customer is seeking. B. Joseph Pine II, one of the pioneers of the mass customization concept, recently wrote an insightful article for HBR that bashed the notion that most organizations are customer-focused. “They focus on markets rather than on any real, living, breathing individual customer,” he wrote here.
Pine offers a fresh perspective on what it means to be truly customer-focused with a list that could be a how-to for understanding what your customers require:
- Every customer is his own market. Every customer deserves to get exactly what he wants at a price he’s willing to pay, and companies must make that happen in a way that makes them money.
- Recognize that every customer is multiple markets. Customers want different offerings at different times under different circumstances.
- You must modularize your capabilities. Break your offerings apart into modular elements like LEGO building blocks, and then create a design experience that helps each customer figure out what he wants.
- Don’t overwhelm your customers with choice. “Fundamentally, customers don’t want choice,” says Pine. They just want exactly what they want.”
- Recognize that mass customization is not being everything to everybody; rather, it is…
Customer Culture as Differentiator
Yesterday, I wrote about companies that have created the position of Chief Customer Officer to bring the Voice of the Customer to the senior leadership team. Today, I want to write about a company that probably doesn’t need a CCO because it differentiates itself through its customer-focused culture.
The Red Wing Shoe Company serves blue-collar trades such as construction workers, telephone lineman, and miners. Located in Red Wing, Minnesota, a city of 6,500 southeast of St. Paul, the company employs 2,200 people, half of them in Red Wing. Earnings for 2010 were $448 million, up 12% from 2009, which was a tough year for the economy and for the company. According to an article on Bloomberg (available here) Red Wing “went to a four-day work week, froze raises, scaled back its second shift, and offered voluntary retirement packages” to survive the recession, but hired more than 300 employees in 2010 as sales rebounded.
Red Wing carves a unique path through the shoe industry:
- It distributes its footwear through nearly 500 company-owned and independent dealerships, which are “old-fashioned shoe stores with sales people who sit with customers, measure their feet, and fit shoes one pair at a time.”
- The 285 independently-owned stores are dealerships from…
