Customer focus part 4 – changing time

How can I be customer focus? That’s the question which everybody in your organization should be able to answer if you’d like to stay longer in business. Yet, as indicated in my previous post, it was not at all surprising an owner of a business found out that nobody except himself believed that customer focus is an important mindset that every business can’t do without. He's not alone; there are many organizations that are in the same situation. Such organizations would be in trouble down the road later due to the fact that they just can’t hold on to the customers unless they make conscious efforts to transform every person towards customer focus.
Why customer focus is important to the owner but not to his 5 key personnel? What he should do to change their mindset so that they would think like him? Where did he go wrong? These are amongst many questions that he has to answer in order to keep his key people on track similar to his thinking. Only after achieving this, he and his team could concentrate to elevate the business to a new height that had been elusive for the past several years.
What would you do when facing similar situation? Most of us would settle on training to quicken the process of transformation of mindset from self focus to customer focus. However, training alone is insufficient and there other crucial activities that must be carried out by these people themselves especially at making it a habit. In order understand the basic feeling of the customers; they must think and act like customers. Through diligent practice daily they might gradually understand the basis of each requirement that their customers asked for.
The owner or boss, on the other hand, must induce a suitable environment for change in his organization, like getting involve in the finding the need of the right training curriculum for the team members and conduct a daily meeting or discussion on building customer focus culture. He should also analyze and get the root cause why his people didn’t think like him. He should get to the bottomline of what benefits that they would gain as individuals by making customers come back for more services or products. He must enforce the 5 steps to satisfying customers as a compulsory work process;
1. Defining requirements of customers.
2. Make certain that all the requirements are feasible.
3. Analyze the options available to satisfy each requirement
4. Design the best option that can make the customers satisfied
5. Verify all the requirements are attainable within the stipulated budget.

Another aspect that the owner can serious look at is how did his people thought about him. He might have shown less attention to customers's demands on few occasions before and demonstrated some indications in the past that he himself didn’t make conscious efforts to satisfy fully the customers. Or he might be forced to change lately due to growing numbers of complaints that can jeopardize his business; or he is facing tremendous pressure of losing his business to a new competitor which he knew the reasons was directly related to lack of customer focus. Or he might also have gotten a frank remainder or two from his customers to start charging his focus towards making them satisfied or face the consequence of loosing them.