Pillars of Excellence: How Your Customer’s Voice is Key to Boosting Profits
Let’s cut right to the chase: We’re in business to fulfill a mission and deliver value that someone—be it stuffy boardroom members, investors, or end users—will pay for with cold, hard cash. Without their monetary thumbs-up, we'd be out of business, period.
Here’s the kicker: We pour heaps of money and effort into crafting killer marketing and sales strategies to draw in these paying customers. But then, bizarrely, we often leave all those golden nuggets of customer insight gathering dust in the realms of sales and marketing. Why aren’t we leveraging this goldmine across our operations?
Do you know why customer success teams exist? I’m talking about the companies that have an account manager, a project manager, technical teams, PLUS a customer success person (or some variation of this). They exist because the company has lost sight of the customer's voice the moment the ink dries on the contract. Suddenly, it’s all about what’s easiest or most cost-effective for them, internally, to deliver the products or services instead of what makes the most sense for the customer.
But shouldn’t the customer perspective be the star of the show at all times, not just before the sale?
Just tuning in? Fuel your journey to operational excellence with our Pillars of Excellence series. Start from the beginning with BUILDING EXCELLENCE: HOW LEAN LEADERSHIP STOPS DAILY FIREFIGHTING, or catch up on last week’s insights with PILLARS OF EXCELLENCE SERIES: BUILDING BRIDGES, NOT TUNNELS.
Understanding Customer Centricity
Customer centricity keeps us focused on what is best for our customers and therefore what is best for our company (and it doesn’t work the other way around). It's about ensuring every process and decision directly addresses the needs and expectations of your customers.
Start with understanding your Voice of The Customer (VOC). Our VOC captures the needs, wants, expectations, and preferences of our customers and, in turn, provides the framework for understanding what is value-add or non-value-add. Integrating VOC into operational strategies ensures that the whole team—not just sales—understands what the customer truly values.
Start with questions like:
What does our client understand the outcome of our product or service to be?
What are we doing to meet the specific outcome of our promised service or product?
What are potential issues that would frustrate our customer?
How could we go above and beyond in supporting our customers?
What does our customer expect from their journey with us?
How does our customer perceive the quality of our product or service?
If they expect a higher quality outcome, are they willing and able to pay for it?
What is the timeliness that our customer expects from us?
How collaborative, responsive, or communicative does our customer need us to be?
You Also Have Internal Customers
Remember, focusing on external customer needs doesn’t mean overlooking our team. At Auxo, we see our employees as internal customers. Their insights and satisfaction are crucial because happy employees lead to happy customers. By starting with a deep understanding of the external customer—who fuels our business financially—we can better empower our internal customers to deliver exceptional service. This approach ensures a win-win situation where both needs are aligned and met.
Cutting The Fat
Once we understand what we need to make our paying customers happy and what is needed to best collaborate with our internal customers, we can have a clear understanding of value-add and non-value add.
From a customer-centric view, if an activity doesn’t add value to the customer, it’s simply waste. Identifying these activities requires a keen understanding of your customer's needs and expectations. Allowing waste to plague our processes keeps our bottom line profitability down, hinder the quality of our work, makes it less likely that we’ll get repeat customers, and just causes confusion throughout our organization.
So, look at your processes with a VOC lens. What steps don’t bring value to your customers? Are those steps helping your employees provide better value to their customers? If not, let’s figure out how to get rid of it. This is a simple, effective way to start making big improvements in customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Operational Imperative
Focusing on the customer goes beyond mere customer service; it’s an operational strategy that drives profitability and efficiency. Ignoring VOC can hurt both your top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability. Think it's time to evaluate your operations? Take our [Operational Excellence Quiz] and see where you can tighten up processes to stop profit leaks and make your customers happier.
Up Next:
Stay tuned for our next discussion in the "Pillars of Excellence" series - Aligning Ambition with Action. It’s all about turning those big dreams into executable, everyday actions.
At Auxo Business Services, we’re all about making sure you’re not just busy, but productive and profitable. Because when you’re on top of your game, we’re on top of ours. Let’s keep building smarter, leaner, and more customer-focused businesses together.