MalcolmSays

Malcolm says:

Innovative management is the most important skill in a climate of uncertainty. Leadership is the way to get people to understand and use innovative management.The test question before taking any key actions is: “Will this add value to my customers or does it have a negative impact on them?” Resolving this type of question often demands new thinking which needs innovative management before it can happen.

Malcolm says

Customer care in its broadest sense is a key factor for us to stay with a particular supplier both in our private and our business life. One of the biggest problems for a supplier of products or services is that they are over optimistic in thinking that their customers love them. Have a look at the first article on my web site www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML to get the whole story.

Malcolm says

Innovation is anything that makes life better for customers, easier for staff and cheaper for the business. Real success is doing all three at once.

Malcolm says

In my experience often the most interesting and useful customer feedback does not come through Sales or Marketing. It comes from functions that deal directly with the customer such as Customer Services, Logistics and Finance. I ask these people what customers are saying and often get some amazing information that by its very nature Sales and Marketing would have no way of capturing. For example the customer whose main reason for using one supplier was the way that they invoiced. (It fitted in well with their own internal systems.) Then there was the customer who didn’t like the way that boxes were opened for testing by the supplier. They thought they were faulty. These customers had told people in their suppliers company about these things before but the people in Logistics and Finance didn’t know who to tell or that this type of information was important.

So my recommendation is to forget trying to further automate stuff that Sales and marketing collect and focus on asking staff at the main customer touch points what they are hearing.

Malcolm says

I think that you are right, 2009 will be the year of the customer/client for smart companies. When times get tough consumers and B2B customers think more about what they buy and who they buy it from. Price is always a point but the RET factor is even more important. RET stands for Relationship, Expertise and Trust. If your business does things that negatively impact any of these three aspects less customers will buy from you. Of course the reverse is also true and that’s why the smart companies are implementing often low cost simple things that will improve their RET rating with customers.

The first step down this path is to understand how customers rate you today. I do a lot of RET surveys and almost without exception the company thinks that their customers will rate them higher than they actually do. With this evidence its much easier to decide what actions to take and what things to leave along. Without this evidence Corporations will continue doing what they think is best which is often not what customers want. Have a look at the survey results on www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML which will explain this in more detail.

My prediction is that companies who do see the light and start to better understanding what their customers want at every touch point will be the ones who are successful in 2009/10.