Fostering Customer-focused Innovation

Is your business customer focused? Customers buy from businesses with which they enjoy interacting. Successful businesses continually look for ways to stay in touch with their customers and to improve their customer relations. There are many ways to do this. Business owners and managers must talk regularly with employees who are in contact with customers on a daily basis. Customer service representatives have first-hand knowledge of the customer service issues pertaining to your business. They also know how and what your customers are thinking. Be sure to listen to your employees when it comes to making customer service improvements in your organization.

Does your business make it easy for customers to complain? The days of putting a complaint box by the door are long gone; research shows that more than 90 percent of customers who stop buying from a business will never tell the business why they stopped. Customer-focused businesses are pro-active and seek answers from their customers. Successful businesses gather information directly from their customers by using periodic surveys, focus groups and informal conversations with customers. Company web sites can be an excellent tool for gathering customer information. It is critical that businesses use this captured information to look for trends. Does this information indicate a change in customer needs? If so, act quickly to find ways to meet your customer's needs. Research also shows that 95 percent of dissatisfied customers will become loyal customers if their complaints are resolved and handled quickly. Customer-focused businesses apply creative strategies to customer problems and deal with them promptly and decisively.

Customer-focused businesses develop strategies to "WOW" the customer. Wowing is nothing more than exceeding your customer's expectations. Wowing the customer can sometimes be as easy as following up with a phone call or email to make sure that a customer service issue has been resolved to your customer's satisfaction. However, "wowing" your customer in some instances may be much more involved. In this instance, someone from the organization will take a personal interest in the customer service issue to ensure that the problem is understood and the appropriate solution has been developed to prevent the problem from re-occurring. In this case, this demonstrates to the customer that the problem was an anomaly and not the business's standard mode of operation.

Losing customers as a result of a customer service issue is expensive. A basic customer service rule is that it is five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer. Customer-focused organizations recognize and reward their employees for ideas resulting in improved customer retention. Can your business improve its bottom line by becoming more customer-focused?

Further support is available from your local Small Business & Technology Development Center to help you with a large variety of business management issues.

- Virgil Woolridge, business specialist, MO SBTDC. For Creating Quality Newsletter, Apr. 2004.