By - Titus Osikoya (SSGB) taosikoya@yahoo.comNo doubt many business owners know how important it is to design their service offerings or products in line with customer’s requirements, the issue however, is that this reality is taken with a level of levity that usually results in the demise of the business.
Successful organizations are those that not only know what their customers want, but have gone to the higher level of pulling their offerings directly from the customers themselves.
To discover what your customers want, you need to continuously be in connection with them. You need to have a standard complaints and feedback mechanism as a lifeline of your business processes.
Getting feedback, complaints or suggestions from your customer is considered as luck, it was referred to as a free-research in the Customer Service Workbook (Lake & Hickey 2002) hence it should be taken as a serious business. From the complaints and feedback of your customers, you can feel the pulse of your business. You can measure how satisfied your customers are and get their ideas on how to improve your products and service offerings.
By the administration of simple surveys, organization of focus groups, Gemba (see for yourself) , you may take notice of important customer issues and suggestions which may be useful in redesigning your processes/products.
Other ways of knowing what the customers want are getting into customer’s shoes through mystery shopping, and engaging front-line operators who directly interact with them daily. The frontline operators possess vital information concerning the customers. Deliberately engaging them in the feedback process is therefore essential to discovering what the customer really desire
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