All Posts Tagged With: "customer knowledge"
Who Are a High School’s Customers?
A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor described the value of analyzing data for high school educators. (“Numbers Game Grows in Education, Healthcare,” March 4, 2010–no link available). The article uses the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (CalPASS) as an example of how “data-driven discoveries are helping to revitalize educators’ efforts.”
CalPASS has a database of more than 355 million student records from kindergarten through college. It uses business intelligence software to analyze the data and provides reports on its findings.
One study found that students who stopped taking English courses after 10th grade required the same level of remediation in community college as students who continued to take advanced English courses through 12th grade. Teachers naturally wondered how this could be true, which caused them to examine the differences between what they were teaching and the expectations of community colleges. According to Brad Phillips, executive director of CalPASS, “educators learned that high-school courses emphasized literature, while community-college courses covered writing and grammar, and four-year colleges emphasized analysis and argumentation. As a result, officials changed high-school teaching to create better alignment.”
From a Baldrige perspective, this means that high school teachers identified community colleges and four-year colleges as their customers, identified their customers’…
15Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedServing 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…
22Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHarvard Business Review’s Most Influential Management Ideas of the Decade
Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.
3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.
4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.
5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.
6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.
7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,”…
4Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedLessons 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…
29Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMy 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:
- 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…
Locking in the Keystones
A “keystone” is the central supporting element of a whole. I believe a high-performing organization has five keystones: (1) mission and vision; (2) core competencies; (3) customer knowledge; (4) organizational learning; and (4) alignment and integration.
I will be posting pages on each of these five keystones. You can look for links to them in the “Pages” column on the home page. As with all posts and pages, I welcome your feedback.
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