Seven Ways to Keep the Customer Front and Center

Sure, you know customers are why you're in business, but it's all too easy to inadvertently neglect them. Here are some quick tips to help you remember who brought you to the dance.

Customers have infinite choices. Any product or service they could ever desire is just within their reach, usually only a mouse-click away. In our global economy, hundreds of competitors may rise and fall practically overnight. What's more, today's customers are smart, savvy and well educated. With so many brands and organizations waiting to serve, they could choose any company. You have to provide a good reason to choose yours.

The key to keeping your business running in high gear is to focus your attention and efforts on -- you guessed it -- the consumer, the client, the customer. Here’s how:

1. Play "follow the leader": good leadership drives customer focus. An organization's leaders set the tone for everything, good or bad, that takes place within the company. It is important that the leader keep his or her focus on the customer rather than internal politics, ego gratification and other typical distractions within an organization.
2. Remind employees of their mission within the organization. Leadership must sincerely and regularly remind workers of the reason they have jobs. A quick daily meeting can establish the tone of the workweek and be a source of inspiration in an organization of any size. Employees have many distractions in the workplace and a constant conversational reminder will ground them in their primary cause within the company.
3. Shine a spotlight on employees. One of the best ways to improve all-around customer service is to give employees the attention they deserve. After all, they are the ones who actually interact with customers. If the workers are consistently well trained, motivated, mentored and equipped with the proper tools to serve the clientele, they will show outstanding passion for their job and thus do it well.
4. Recognize outstanding service. By identifying exceptional workers in a dignified manner, leadership sets the pace for other peers to follow.
5. Learn from mistakes. If an organization fails to deliver excellent customer service, leadership must be honest and open with both customers and employees about the mistakes that were made. Mistakes are important because they lead to innovation. Management must outline clear actions that will remove the causes of the organization's failures and then take steps to alleviate the problem.
6. Consider using a focus group. A focus group brings together a small, carefully selected group of people to explore perceptions about a certain idea, service, policy or product.
7. Keep customers informed of improvements. When an organization makes a much-needed innovation to its services, it must be communicated to the customers. They are the ones, after all, who demand the evolution.

Overall, a successful organization is one that offers the best services possible to its targeted clientele and does all it can to ensure customers' needs are met with promptness, gratitude and courtesy. Any problem issues that arise with customers should be documented and addressed immediately. Meanwhile, management should research all possible modes of innovation to continue bringing the customer superior-quality service.

By Craig Cochran, author of Becoming a Customer-Focused Organization (Paton Press, January, 2006), in which he discusses in more depth all of the above tips and provides a wealth of additional information on becoming more quality oriented and customer focused.

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"Even if you're on the right track -- you'll get run over if you just sit there."

-- Arthur Godfrey

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