All Posts Tagged With: "customer requirements"
Playing to Win Customers
It’s an old question—“What will help us attract and retain customers?”—with a very new answer: gaming. In “Play to win: The game-based economy” (Fortune, September 3, 2010), JP Mangalindan describes companies that “study and identify natural human tendencies and employ game-like mechanisms to give customers a sense that they’re having fun while working towards a rewards-based goal.” Companies don’t do this because they want their customers to have fun; they do it because it helps them attract and retain customers, which increases their revenues.
If you’re wondering how “gamification” might apply to your company, consider Mangalindan’s examples:
- Mint.com made personal finance a game. You can set a financial goal online and track your performance toward achieving it. You can check out your total financial score, which encourages financially responsible behavior. You can even compete with other members who have similar goals. If you think that sounds lame, think again: Mint.com claims more than 1.5 million active users.
- Nike sells a pedometer (Nike +) that you put in your sneakers. It monitors distance, pace, and calories burned and transmits the data to your iPod. The Nike software on your iPod “rewards” you if you reach a milestone. For example, if you run and you best your 5-mile distance time, Lance Armstrong congratulates you via audio clip. Nike has sold more than 1.3 million Nike +…
Kano Satisfaction Model
A few years ago, I met Noriaki Kano at a hotel restaurant in St. Paul to talk about his famous satisfaction model that helped earn him a Deming Prize and ASQ Medals of Distinction. A retired professor, Kano still spoke about the evolution of his model with intensity and curiosity.
The point of the Kano Satisfaction Model is that organizations need a profound understanding of their customers’ requirements to increase satisfaction and secure loyalty. Not all customer requirements are equal. The Baldrige Criteria ask: “How do you use customer, market, and product offering information to identify and anticipate key customer requirements and changing expectations and their relative importance to customers’ purchasing or relationship decisions?”According to Kano, “relative importance” can be characterized as basic, performance, and excitement.
Basic services or features do little to improve satisfaction unless they fail, in which case they can cause serious dissatisfaction. We expect the checkout lane in a store to move relatively quickly and without any problems. When it does, we don’t feel more satisfied with the store because that is what we expected. When it doesn’t, we feel frustrated and dissatisfied.
Performance services or features are those that produce customer satisfaction. If the store you are visiting is Wal-Mart and you get excited about paying the lowest prices, the signage showing great deals is a differentiable service.…
30Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Post-Industrial Marketplace
If your organization is interested in serving the post-industrial marketplace (if it’s not, you’re in trouble), Seth Godin is as good a guide as you’re going to find. Not only does he know what’s going on, he understands the impact of rapid technological change on business. As he writes, “the world is being remade again and again, and the agents of change are the winners.”
The quote comes from “A post-industrial A to Z digital battledore,” which lists his 26 favorite neologisms (even though most are not newly-invented words). Several thought-provoking definitions relate to meeting customer requirements including:
- C is for Choice: “Digital commerce enables niches” because “given the choice, people will take the choice.”
- F is for the Free Prize: “People often don’t buy the obvious or measured solution to their problem, they buy the extra, the bonus, the feeling and the story.”
- I is for Ideavirus: “Ideas that spread win, and you can architect and arrange and manipulate your ideas to make them more likely to spread.”
- K is for kindle: Not the ebook reader. “The internet responds better to bonfires that are kindled over time, to ideas that spread because the idea itself is the engine, not the hype or the promotion.”
- O is for the Orangutan: “The primate is the best way to think about how people interact with websites. They’re like monkeys in…
Fast Food Customer Focus
When Pal’s Sudden Service, a small fast-food chain in Tennessee, won the Baldrige Award in 2001, its president, Thom Crosby, suddenly realized that winning prohibited them from reapplying for five years. “I called up the head of the program and asked if we could decline the award and stay in the system. He didn’t want to hear that.”
Pal’s continues to conduct annual internal assessments because, as Crosby states, “I’m a real big believer.” Like other world-class companies, Pal’s benefits from asking and answering key questions that reveal how the organization works. The snapshot produced by this exercise becomes the engine for change, improvement, and success.
The questions explore all areas that are critical to an effective management system. Many of the questions have never been asked, which means many of the areas they address have never been evaluated. And therein lays their power.
A few years ago I asked these questions of senior leaders at an organization that dominated market share in its industry. One question in particular solicited a variety of responses. The question was: How do you determine key customer requirements and expectations?
Many of the leaders talked about how they interacted with their customers daily. Others mentioned customer surveys, complaints, and lost customer interviews, among other approaches. Nobody described a process. I asked how they used the information from these…
16Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedStakeholder Mapping
Ford uses a process called stakeholder mapping to create a physical display of the groups involved in a public dialogue about the company. The stakeholder map fits on a computer screen or a wall board and shows who influences, or should influence, the company and what issues most concern them.
In “The Art of Corporate Listening” (Bloomberg BusinessWeek, May 11, 2010), Peter Firestein writes about how a good stakeholder map displays not only the issues that concern each stakeholder group, but it clusters the groups by shared interests. In Baldrige language, this would be stakeholder requirements instead of issues and the list of groups would likely be different. Firestein mentions investors, NGOs, communities, regulators, and news reporters. It seems to me that customers and employees are major key influencers that certainly participate in the public dialogue about a company.
I think Firestein is exactly right when he states that the “most powerful part of stakeholder map-building is the culture change it brings to the management team. They must commit to becoming the source of the map’s content, and the only way they can fulfill that commitment is by engaging actively with the company’s stakeholders. Such engagement sensitizes them to external attitudes about the company.”
In the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria, one area to address asks about this specific issue:
- What are your key…
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’ requirements, and changed their curricula to better meet those requirements.
That’s an excellent start but I’m not sure it will solve…
15Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWalk 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…
1Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
