Читать книгу NEXT STOP: UNSTOPPABLE - Malte Stöckert - Страница 7

What Really Matters Is What the Customer Is Saying

A business? It’s not worth starting at all if you don’t know exactly what your customer wants.

No customers means no business being done. No customers interested in your product means no revenue being generated. Simply put, no customers means no company. And if the customer isn’t getting a product that adds value to him or her in some way, that also means: no company.

The farmer tills the field and grows the grain, which he sells to the miller, who grinds flour from it and sells it to the baker, who then makes bread from it and sells it to his customers at the bakery, the folks buying the bread. The added value the baker prepares for his customers is that of satiety – a vital detail because, without satisfied customers, the baker can’t fulfill his role, which in turn directly affects the miller and the farmer, too.

The farmer, the miller, and the baker must produce their products in such high quality that they’re accepted by us as customers. If the quality of the bread deteriorates, we go to another baker and buy the bread there. If the bread at the first baker gets too expensive for our liking, again, we simply go to another baker and buy the bread there.

The quality of the product and the price we’re willing to pay for it are somehow related, but it’s no longer the case that the most expensive product is also of the highest quality. Many other aspects (not just the subjective ones) play a much greater role in the purchase of products today than we’re commonly aware of – even when just buying bread. The nutrition-conscious shopper will be willing to spend more money on a high-quality loaf of bread, while the eco-sustainable shopper will want to buy organic goods and is probably willing to spend more money on them. Still, other shoppers are just interested in the bread being inexpensive.

Either way, it’s the customer who ultimately puts the price tag on us as manufacturer, producer, or provider of a service.

The better we manage to produce our product in a cost-efficient manner, the greater the revenue we’ll be able to collect. In fact, lean management has become increasingly popular in recent decades to develop and establish efficient processes. The greater the administration effort, meaning the effort not directly related to the creation of the product nor its fulfillment, the lower the revenue you generate from it.

The quality of the product or service we provide is a key factor in determining whether a company remains competitive (whether it can sell its products to customers in such a way that keeps them coming back). Although repeatedly delivering the same high quality is the right thing to do, it’s just not enough these days either. Today, product quality must keep growing and growing because any standstill in development means falling behind a competitor and no longer being first in the eyes of the customer.

There are countless examples where the consistent quality of the product has ultimately led to companies disappearing from the market. Not even large global corporations are spared from this. One example is the cellphone manufacturer Nokia: when’s the last time you bought something cellphone-related from them?

If a company gets too busy with internal administration and forgets about meeting the customer’s needs, stagnation is inevitable. In the long run, the company’s products will become too expensive or no longer respond to customer demand; the company will have to downsize, shrink, or even disappear from the market altogether.

Consistently delivering good quality doesn’t cut it for the customer anymore. Nowadays, that’s a prerequisite for having any success in the market at all.

Middle management in many manufacturing and service companies must run efficient processes, pay attention to costs, and ensure high quality all at the same time. They also regularly deal with issues of team leadership and report to higher management with justifications for why x number of resources are being spent for y – and all of this under the permanent pressure to save costs.

It’s no wonder that the connection to the product thus the customer is pushed into the background since the manager is too busy providing the latest data collection while having to justify figures that aren’t as good as previously predicted or demanded by the higher-ups. I call this phenomenon customer distance, which is becoming greater and greater.

Many managers today very rarely think about what their product triggers in the end customer or even how the customers feel when they’re holding the company’s product in their hands. If this customer relationship no longer exists – as I’ve seen and experienced time and again in recent years in many large and medium-sized companies – then the meaningfulness of the whole activity is quickly being forgotten. If the customer is no longer the direct contact person, then there’s a great danger that the person involved in the creation of the product or service is losing touch with great quality and simply doesn’t empathize with the customer (nor wants to).

But what does “quality” actually mean? When you’ve booked a stay in a four-star hotel, you have a certain expectation of the quality of service you're going to get. Clean rooms, very good food, and courteous service are all the norm, right? It’s often the case, even in the best hotels, that there are unskilled or inexperienced employees working at reception. Nothing infuriates the travel-weary guest more than an unfriendly reception or an inefficient check-in process. Although everyone should know that it’s the first impression that really counts, so many hotels don’t place enough value on a friendly and courteous welcome at reception. It sounds so simple and yet somehow, apparently, so complicated to provide consistently excellent quality of service there.

Yet if I as a hotel manager don’t succeed in this transfer, namely putting myself in the customer’s shoes, then I simply won’t be able to retain guests. And if I can’t manage this transfer as part of company output, then the customer’s opinion seems completely irrelevant to me. Customer distance is then infinite, practically in another dimension. In my many conversations with product teams, I heard the following claim repeatedly when it came to new product development in higher price ranges: “The customer doesn’t want that” – said without any factual basis whatsoever or the actual “customer” having been asked. Too large a customer distance – whether consciously made because it’s easier to keep to the usual habits, it’s just not possible to minimize it, or daily work challenges are so diverse that it’s often a matter of justification – simply ensures, in the long run, that either fulfillment of service or product quality will suffer.

Even worse, the manager, having signed up for the job with good intentions, loses touch with the meaningfulness of his task and thus any deeper fulfillment in what he does. Without this deeper connection, he only does his job well enough to meet the minimum requirements because he’s constantly thinking about how this isn’t the right fit or what he was actually looking for. Though it’s not his intention, the manager actively ensures the deterioration of product or service quality precisely in this way. He is constantly looking for distractions on the outside, whether that means changing jobs, or deciding how and where he wants to spend his next vacation.

Consider the hotel example again. On the one hand, I must have left well over a hundred hotel ratings and reviews in my life, yet I have received just ONE response to my reviews. So, what’s the point of those comment forms in hotel rooms? How do I know anyone is reading my remarks on the quality of the service or the cleanliness of the room? As a customer, I’m obviously not being taken seriously here. How else can you explain all the other hotels that haven’t given feedback on my comments? On the other hand, though, how EASY is it to seriously consider the customer’s opinion and thus increase the quality of your service – even if that just means the hotel phoning the customer and thanking him for the comments? Again and again, I read about feel-good hotels advertising how they’re the best place to kick back and relax. Seriously? These are exactly the hotels that should be taking the time to understand their customers’ comments and criticisms.

For the manager, this means consciously seeking to understand customer orientation. When the manager is properly oriented towards the customer, he’s constantly imagining what the customer will feel or think when she first experiences that perfectly crafted product.