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The Key to Customer Focus
By Joseph Malecki
Who are Your Customers?Customer focus comes from meeting important customer needs. It may seem obvious, but you have to understand who your customers are and what they need. Your customers could be:
• the ultimate consumer of your product or service.
• a buyer.
• a reseller.
• an executive who makes the purchasing decision for an entire organization.Identifying your customers requires analyzing your business and what you offer, and knowing who makes the decision to pay you. In your business, the end customer may be important, but if you ignore the needs of the decision maker, you are nowhere!
What are Your Customers' Needs?
• Basic Needs. A model developed by Noriaki Kano describes three types of customer needs. The first are basic needs that must be met, so basic that they are expected. Once you meet this type of need and stop dissatisfying the customer, the need diminishes in importance. An example is billing accuracy. The more errors in a bill, the more dissatisfied I am. But once the bill is 100% accurate, I stop thinking about accuracy.
• Satisfier Needs. The second type of customer needs is satisfier needs. Customers bring these up when you ask about their needs. The more this type of need is met, the more satisfied the customer is. The less the need is met, the less satisfied. An example of this kind of need is responsiveness of service personnel. The longer a customer has to wait, the less satisfied they are. The shorter the wait, the more satisfied the customer is.
• Delighter Needs. The third type of customer needs is unexpected needs. Meeting these needs delights customers because they didn't realize that the need could be met. An example of meeting a delighter need was Federal Express' introduction of package tracking. Since then, competitors have duplicated this, demonstrating how quickly delighters become mere satisfiers.
Uncovering these customer needs is the province of market research, which is beyond the scope of this article. You may want to hire a professional for this research, but beware! In our experience, not all market researchers are familiar with uncovering all three types of customer needs.
Joseph Malecki is President of the Northstar Consulting Group.
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