Customer focus part 6 - Leadership

In any situation where a group of people striving towards a common goal; leadership is the most important factor that will determine the success of the group. Hence, in an organiszation which aims to sustain continuous growth, it must be taken into serious consideration to have a process in which leadership is natured and developed so that the continuous growth can be realized. Leadership must not be taken for granted and it cannot be assumed that anyone in the group is capable to leading it towards achieving its objectives. Leaders are people who excel in specialized skills unique to the individual who assumes the leadership role and in addition possesses a mindset that is positive in his/her everyday undertakings.
Organizations that are successful in focusing on the needs of their customers are, besides having able leaders; those that also have successfully developed a pool of strong and reliable team-leaders. These team-leaders are skillful, very well trained and have comprehensive and thorough knowledge and techniques in problem solving techniques. Strong leadership qualities like the 11 attributes of leadership (listed below) given in the book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill are essential to serve as reinforcement in their personal qualities. The attributes of leadership are;
1. Unwavering courage
2. Self-control
3. Sense of justice
4. Definiteness of decisions
5. Definiteness of plans
6. Habit of doing more than paid for
7. Pleasing personality
8. Sympathy and understanding
9. Mastery of details
10. Takes full responsibility
11. Cooperation
For visual presentation of these attribute, please click here.
Problem solving quality calls for more addition habits than those listed above; team-leaders must possess a particular mindset that of a professional solutions provider. As in my previous post, the pro solutions providers must live by these 10 principles that are essential for team-leaders to instill them as habitual actions. They are;
1. Never tell a lie.
2. Utilize accurate facts.
3. ‘Do all the calculations’; educate and equip with proper knowledge
4. Train, acquire and get certification on specialized skills, ‘be a pro in you trade’
5. Solve one problem at a time. ‘
6. Measure and analyze all contributing causes or customers’ requests rigorously
7. Be creative
8. Be rational and open-minded when making solutions.
9. Challenge difficult situation personally.
10. Never give up or quit

Customer focus part 5 – What’s the problem

In today’s post I’d like to write about the similarity between problems and customers’ requirements. Problem can be simply defined as the difference or gap from an accepted value in a particular situation. A problem will exist when a guy smokes a cigarette in a room that is occupied by non-smokers. In this case, smoking is an unacceptable value of a group of non-smokers, so the gap between the smoker’s and the group’s values is causing a problem here. A problem can also merge in a situation when your boss wants you to complete a certain task 3 days in advance from the previous date agreed between you and your boss. Like wise, customers can give you ‘problems’ when they request various changes from your standard designs.
In order to understand the nature of various requests from customers, it will be enlightening for us to grasp the 4 types of problems in business environment. Since customers’ requirements are some sort of structured problems, they must be solved in order for us to gain the confidence of customers which subsequently lead to more business. No matter how difficult they seem to be, it is inevitable that we have to get the right solutions for all their requests.
A customer request or ‘the cause of a problem’ can be simply divided into 2 basic categories; they are either known to you or unknown. Similarly, the solutions for the requests, they can also be categorized as either known or unknown. Thus, from this similarity we can combine all these 4 categories and presented them in a matrix of 2 X 2. This type of matrix is useful and can assist us in making better decisions towards taking the correct actions to satisfying the customers.
Problem is the product of cause and solution. We’d normally say that a problem is simple if the cause is known and the solution is also known. If you have the right technology for every request, satisfying your customers is a simple matter. When the causes are known but the solutions are unknown, these problems may require a relative higher degree of sophistication to solve; problems of such nature require technology that must be acquired from outside sources. It’s like knowing the brakes of your car are worn out and you don’t have the knowledge to change them by yourself; this case we will sent the car to the repairman. If you face with this type of requirements, you might need out source or to employ an expert in order to complete them for you.
The third type of requests are that you might received those that your customers might just indicated by telling you their desired results, like increasing the production output by 50% from present situation. If you can only increase a maximum of 10% with the existing system, you might have to do R&D and challenge the target set by the customer. If there’s a similar system in the market that is performing as what your customer’s requested, you might acquire the system and perform a cause analysis or reverse engineering. This is the fourth type of problem or requirement from your customers.Thus, knowing precisely where you stand in working towards to satisfying you customers is important matter.

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.

Customer focus part 3 – the simultaneous shifting of heads

Free consultations from customers in favor to their usage of the products and services are good in the sense that these suggestions can initiate the change of momentum towards continuous improvement of the products or services. Listening to customers can indeed make us move forward with new ideas that could change the existing current standard entirely. These forced-changes must be challenged for they would open up a new frontier or dimension in the business.
All loops that were closed for sometimes may be already too long and need to be reopened for new breakthroughs. Making small changes for new improvements must be encouraged by everybody in the organization. Everybody must be aware of all changes no matter how small they are. All eyes must be on the ball. When all eyes are glued on the ball, the simultaneous shifting of heads of spectators watching the Wimbledon Men Single Final should give us the picture of how everybody much act in an organization that encourages small changes of continuous improvement.
All requirements of customers must be taken as stipulated problems. They must be analyzed to generate several solution options that must be subjected for intense discussions before selecting the most appropriate solution for implementation. These steps of problems solving are very normal for organizations that are already accustomed to problems solving. For organizations that had taken negative approaches towards problem solving would find such steps a little awkward initially, however, overtime could be experts through constant practice.
The elements of the spiraling upwards movement of continuous improvement always begins with
1. Stipulated problems
2. Problem solving activities
3. Setting as current standards which would always subject to change
4. Current Improved system (products and services)

Customer focus part 2 - leadership

In his book, Napoleon Hill stressed on the important QQS formula for individuals to ‘apply it as a habit’ during the period of employment to gain excellence and build wealth. He said that in order to be successful in one’s profession an individual must provide quality service all the time (in quantity) and always in good spirit through harmonious cooperation with members of the organization that the belong. This formula was more suitable for the “go-giver” type of mindset who gives more than he gets, rather than the ‘go-getter” type as mentioned by the Mr. Hill, but ironically even though 70 years have passed, the “go-giver” type of mindset are still a rare species.
Once I distributed a questionnaire on leadership style to a group of 6 people that represented the management of a small medium enterprise in a seminar that I moderated on mastermind formation. Amongst the questions asked was customer focus and surprisingly nobody except the business owner himself (managing director) acknowledged that customer focus was one of the most an important aspect of leadership in business today. He agreed that it was a serious deficiency in his organization and wanted me to work on it immediately.
Such organizations as above are slow in their actions to satisfy their customers at 100% percent level and also slow to react to complaints and claims from customers who could turn their attentions to other better providers. When customer focus is given top priority managers and engineers would begin to take heed of the ‘consultations’ from customers that are not only free but also got many intrinsic values attached to them. Delivering what they'd expected is the shortest cut towards becoming a top quality provider.
Leadership pattern in business organizations that seek excellence in giving 100% satisfaction to customers is associated to closed alliance of mindsets of individual key personnel working very hard towards giving their customers the feeling of being in the ‘family’.
Leadership style of customer focus must in agreeable with the points listed below.
1. United effort to manage as a team with a mastermind ideology

2. Guide and educate inside and outside (contractors, suppliers and regulators) people / stakeholders towards rendering customers' satisfaction

3. Eliminate defects and improve quality their respective quality based on requirements given by customers

4. Reduce costs and share benefits with inside people and not forgetting the customers

5. Guarantee production volume by meeting delivery datelines

6. Listen to customers and sell products and services that delight them

7. Maintain safety as to avoid hardship to people and the organization in general

8. Create a rewarding workplace by giving those who performed recognition and wealth

Customer focus part 1 – Customers’ requirements

Products or services have particular relationship with the people who benefit from them. Different people benefited in different ways from products or services they procured, expectations on a particular product vary sometimes greatly from person to person. Products or services that excel in giving them what they want are regarded as having quality. On the other hand, the products and services that fail to give them the expected results are regarded as inferior or products and services that got no quality. Hence, quality is relative and depending on the expectations of user, like the saying; “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”
As customers are becoming more educated and have easy access to information sources, their dependence on sales persons or sales engineers for information on the products or services are fast decreasing. With the Internet, prospects are readily accessible with mountains of information and this has forced a change in the perspective of the customers toward the information provided by the sales persons. It’s very common for a prospect to immediately get online as soon as the sales person leaves prospect’s office to source for additional information. He/she can easily turn to the Internet for products knowledge in numerous ways, such as getting more facts from competitors’ websites, online forums, blogs and how to.. websites. Thus, the method of how producers and service providers compete are much more open and in order to win they must identify accurately pinpointing the characteristics that surely satisfy the customers in question. The assumptions that all customers can be satisfied by standard features that designers and engineers have thought of are just not going to work nowadays as demands from customers might not be as similar. As I’d written in previous post, sales persons must really get involved in understanding the customers' requirements before engaging in the process of making the products or services so as to grasp the reasons behind each requirement comprehensively before informing the people involved in the production. Sales are the front-wheel-drive; sales persons are the people who deliver exactly what customers want; after which the designers and engineers would transform these requirements into functional units of the products or services. Sales persons have to be the front runner in the defining, measuring, analyzing, designing and verifying the requirements of their customers accurately and get these items endorsed by the customers before kicking off the making process of such products and services.

QQS formula

I was quite surprised when stumbled upon the QQS formula in an old but one of the greatest books ever written about personal achievement. In his book Think and Grow Rich (published in 1937), Napoleon Hill clearly outlined the customers’ focused formula of QQS which meant Quality, Quantity and Spirit. It clearly shown that entreprenuers had already being told the 3 words that were the focal point of customers’ satisfaction long before the emergence of customers focused companies like Sony, Honda and Samsung.
My next series of posts will focus on these 3 magical words that had revolutionized the way businesses being conducted today.