What is it that you’re saying?

What is that you’re saying?

After getting off the phone with a company’s customer service department, which is now on my blacklist, I have to wonder if these guys ever listen to their customers? This question comes up when we provide operational support to our portfolio companies. This applies across the board from your product management process to your content marketing strategy to competitive positioning and generally to any functional area and any specific aspect of those domains–it’s all about your customer!

This idea seems to be intuitively obvious, and we all like to think we know what our customers want, but typically, we don’t. Few companies have put a stake in the ground to even say their customers’ voices matter let alone having the proper goals, metrics, customer feedback process, organizational and management systems, internal and external tools/resources, and people owning the customer management experience.

There are many ways to slice and dice customer feedback or customer management–a few of which I will dive into in future posts. For now, I want to focus on the fundamental question that many companies neglect prior to setting up a customer feedback and management process–who is your customer? This might seem obvious, or you might be of the opinion that anyone could be your customer, or who you sell to today is not who you will be selling to in the future, etc…

Regardless of your response, it is so important to build out your personas around your current customer base to understand what pain you are resolving , BUT the other extremely important element to this example is understanding if they are a ‘good’ customer (leading to good profits) or ‘bad’ customer (leading to bad profits). You might be adversely reacting to this idea of good and bad customers, but not every customer is a good customer. There are many customers that detract you from your focus or ones that ultimately will cost you more to keep than let go. This idea comes up in The Ultimate Question by Fred Reicheld and Answering the Ultimate Question  (great books if you have not read them).

To figure out who your customers are, there are many angles to take, but you will want to do both primary and secondary research to get the most comprehensive assessment. You want to understand the organizational and unit as well as the buyer and user types. This can be done by identifying common threads in any of the following parameters : vertical, size, geography, budget, job description, title, age or other demographics , skill set, technology or situational prerequisite, etc… the list can go on depending upon the company and pain point you are solving . Once there might be a hypothesis of who the ideal customer(s) is, speaking and engaging with current, lost, and potential customers is very important to validate or alter your hypothesis. The best but most inefficient way to engage is speaking to a sample of them in person or over the phone. If you have a large base, an email or online survey might provide a large enough sample size to further develop the hypothesis.

Once you understand who your customers are today, you can figure out how and who to listen to. So… who are your customers? While more to come, enough said for today…