By Chally Kacelnik
It’s easy to just pay lip service to the idea of customer value, but really understanding your customers makes all the difference.
Our Managing Director, Sam Robinson, wrote recently about a model we use to help our clients shift their service delivery to centre customer value. Today I’m writing about the other side of the coin: how to shift your thinking so you genuinely understand customer needs. To draw on Sam’s explanation, organisations are often so stuck on “what we do” that they don’t have a great understanding of what customers actually need, perceive, and get out of your organisation.
Here are some practical, tried and true areas of focus that we use with our clients to help make that shift:
- What customers value (as opposed to what they receive)
- How the manner in which services are provided or facilitated by the organisation is experienced
- How they wish to interact with you as the service provider
- New trends and different channels (like face to face or digital interaction) by which customers wish to interact with you
- That each demographic or category of customer will have different experiences and expectations for which you need to cater
These are starting points for building the robust insights needed to satisfy your customers’ requirements. Your service design and delivery should be driven by keen understanding of customer behaviours, attitudes, and needs. It’s not enough to make assumptions, especially when those assumptions are retrospectively formed to fit your service provision as it currently stands. When it comes to providing services, customers know when you’re just paying lip service.
LKS Quaero can help you reorient your services to better serve your customers. Visit us at lksquaero.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
