All Posts Tagged With: "customer requirements"
Meaningful Innovation
One of the great strengths of the Baldrige model is that it starts at the beginning. How do you set your mission and vision? How do you determine what your strategic plan should address? How do you identify your key customer groups and markets? How do you know what motivates your employees? How do you design your work processes?
These are foundational questions: If you don’t have rock-solid answers for them, everything that follows will be shaky.
The same is true for innovation. The most innovative organizations start at the beginning with a rock-solid understanding of customer wants and needs, organizational capabilities, and transformational trends that could disrupt their markets and give them a competitive advantage.
The transformational potential of innovation is the subject of “On Tracking Transformational Trends” by Scott Anthony (HBR, January 17, 2011). From his experience, he identifies three areas to assess whether a trend is or is not transformation, using the iPod and 3-D television as examples:
- Market fit. The innovation makes is easier and simpler to do what people are already doing. The iPod provides music on the go. The 3-D television prioritizes something that wasn’t that important. “Do people really want to make the effort to watch 3-D television?”
- Performance.…
A Baldrige View of Customer Experience
The Baldrige Criteria ask: How do you create an organizational culture that ensures a consistently positive customer experience and contributes to customer engagement?
Adam Richardson defines “customer experience” as the sum-totality of how customers engage with your organization and brand through the entire arc of being a customer. In “Understanding Customer Experience” (HBR, October 28, 2010), he suggests three layers of customer experience to consider:
- Customer Journey. The journey a customer takes with your organization from first contact to providing a product or service to supporting that product or service and extending the relationship with the customer.
- Touchpoints. All of the points where the customer interacts with your organization.
- Ecosystems. By Richardson’s definition, the integrated ecosystems of products, software, and services that offer more than isolated touchpoints.
Have you ever used Zipcar? It’s the largest car-sharing company in the United States (it’s also in Vancouver, Toronto, and London). Here in the Twin Cities, the Zipcar locations are all in or near the University of Minnesota; college students are big Zipcar customers. Richardson touts Zipcar as a great example of a company that used its understanding of the entire arc of the customer car-renting experience to turn car-sharing into a mainstream business—and help the environment in the…
1Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedPlaying 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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
17May2010 | Steve George | 3 comments | Continued
