Customer Value Tip #3: Meet your Customers at the Coalface

How to increase customer value, engagement and retention

The Customer Value tips edition offers one simple and actionable idea that you can digest in less than 5 minutes. If you enjoy these free posts, give a try to the paid plan:

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Gaining a deep understanding of the customer

Head down to a swanky downtown customer research agency and they will charge you $30-50k for a month’s work and hand over a detailed report on the needs and wants of YOUR customers. Customer Insight is big business, and high ROI when done right.

There are many different sources of customer intelligence and different ways to capture and articulate the customer insights, such as:

1. Key performance indicators (KPIs) - e.g. customer satisfaction scores, net promoter score (NPS)

2. Complaint data - e.g. volumes and reasons of dissatisfaction

3. Customer surveys - e.g. map of customer demographics and preferences

4. Custom research - e.g. qualitative research such as customer interviews

I would encourage you to do all of the above. However, there is also number 5 to add to this list which is a simpler, better and cheaper way to enhance your understanding of the customer which is not talked about enough. What’s more - the solution is also right on your doorstep.

In business, there is a saying that goes like this:

Top management knows about 10% of the company’s issues.

Middle-management knows about 40% of the company’s issues.

Customer services agents knows about 100% of the company’s issues.

An organisational challenge is that as people become more senior, they are further and further removed the customer. Spreadsheets, research reports and PowerPoints are useful customer intel — but listen up, leaders — let me ask you this:

• When was the last time you met with one of your customers face-to-face?

• Stood side-by-side to your sales staff and served customers at the shop floor?

• Dealt with a complaint from a disgruntled customer?

I don’t like the word “back-to-the-floor” exercise, but it describes well the intent of what we’re trying to do next. Important to note is that it should NOT be about observing what your junior sales & servicing colleagues do. I’m instead advocating for managers to get their hands dirty and start doing the doing to gain a deep understanding of both the customer and the operational side to your business.

We all have different learning preferences, but I would highly recommend the above hands-on approach because:

Learning = Seeing + Listening + Reading + Doing

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How does this look and feel like in practice?

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

For senior leaders, there is a wealth of information and learnings in having conversations and direct interactions with customers. You can extract information with a view to build back better by making important observations and learnings about what your customers are saying about the company’s products, policies, processes and people.

Here are my five top tips on how to practically embed these practices in your own organisation:

1. Get into the shoes of your junior sales & operations staff

   Spend regular time on the shop floor, production line, call centre — or whichever situation applies to your business and industry. Important here is that you are “doing the doing” and carrying the bag for yourself so to speak. Sitting side-by-side next to another team member who is dealing with the customer is better than nothing, but it’s not quite the same as getting first-hand experience dealing with the customers. Ensure that you make this a regular and recurring activity (e.g. monthly, quarterly) and not a once-a-year activity.

2. Seize the opportunity to get directly involved in complaints

   If one of your important customers files a complaint with your business, the senior leaders are likely going to get visibility of this. Instead of passively waiting for the outcome and hoping for the best, be proactive and take ownership of the situation by getting directly involved. If the customer gets a call from the CEO or MD directly, it shows the customer that you are serious about doing business and this approach will command respect and go a long way.

3. If you can’t come to the customer, the customer must come to you

   Invite the customers to your office to have a casual conversation with them or a facilitated interview individually or in groups (caveat: you might need to incentivise them with a small token of appreciation, in case your customers are just customers and not fans yet). Ask them about current needs, likes, dislikes, preferences, get feedback on new ideas and ask how they see the future.

4. Take customers out for lunch, dinner and events

   Spend time with customers in a casual capacity, such as a business lunch meeting. Important to note this is not meant to be a covert sales pitch, but from a relationship-building point of view and to hear what they have to say and focus on what you can learn from the conversation.

5. Experimental CX events

   This is a bit like Customer & Management team matchmaking, and the intent is to give your non-customer facing staff an opportunity to interact with customers. If you’re a big company, consider including departments like HR, Engineering, Risk, Legal and Compliance teams. It’s important that EVERYONE is involved in this and understand they are all working towards one goal and purpose - understanding and meeting the needs of the customer. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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Put your customer insights into business practice

As you’ve now extracting a wealth of new information about your customers, it’s super-important that you also document, structure and funnel the information to the right people in your organisation.

In other words, you’ll want to systemize the above process and make sure it’s repeatable and scalable.

Going through your list of new customer insights step-by-step, you can work with your team to translate these into specific action points to make improvements to your products, processes, services etc - as guided by the customer’s needs and feedback.

Make sure you repeat all of the above throughout the year.

Hope you found this content useful and on a concluding note, I will end this newsletter with the following quote:

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

- Sam Walton

PS - If you found this post helpful, please tap the ❤️ and share the post to tell others about this publication. Thanks!

Jens