Management
Issue No. 12 - August/September 2003
It Happened at Umanage
The Australian Institute of Management’s annual Umanage event in July was a strong gathering of management expertise and leading—edge thought.
Kate Costello of Governance Matters presented a paper dedicated to ‘Hardwiring the Voice of the Customer in Your Organisation’.
Kate lists three main steps in the hardwiring process.
- Listen to your customers
- Do something with what you hear
- Keep the momentum going
Quoting Richard Whitley, author of The Customer Driven Company, Kate explains why listening to customers and treating them well pays dividends.
High profits correlate better with customer perception of quality than with any other variable listed, including market share; and 70% of the reasons customers won’t want to deal with you again has nothing to do with your product.
Customers’ answers to three critical questions are most important:
- What characteristics of our products/services are most important to you?
- How do we perform in these characteristics against your expectations?
- Is there anything else we need to do to improve?
There are several ways to collect customer opinion:
- Customer focus groups and advisory committees
- Face—to—face interviews
- Staff seconded to customers
- Customer surveys
- ‘Opportunity to Improve’ reports
- Customer debriefings
- Customer presentations
Exercising influence
Calling on the principles of Robert Cialdini, the author of The Psychology of Persuasion, Kate structures an exercise that helps apply the ‘Influence’ principles to business clientele and develop action plans from the results.
Implementation being the key, Kate devotes most of her time to ‘How To Do Something With What You Hear’, a five—step process.
Step 1:Organise and analyse your customer information
T...
