Every spendid thing begins with an idea
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
How much information can you pass on to your boss or a working committee on a piece of A4 (about letter-size) paper? Not a whole lot. You just can’t use it to contain the whole report of a cost saving project that took 3 weeks to complete. However, it can contain complete daily progress report that include graph, charts, drawing and matrixes; enough information for the boss to be updated and informed about the daily progress that you'd made. This type of report is commonly known as one-page report, and it is an invaluable piece of objective evidence that tells the story about the events of the particular day in the course of completing a project.
Why a one-page report is indispensable for a project or a job assignment? There are two good reasons why this one-page report is indispensable. The first is a one-page report on an A4 paper is just nice to fax to the boss or peers of the same project team but located in separate locations; second it can be filed in and converted into the project journal or ledger which would be useful later when compiling the final report of such project. “A piece a day will keep the boss away”….emm, how about that?
The one-page report is usually prepared by hand in about 20 to 30 minutes and it’s normally written towards the end of each day. The content is restricted to the day’s results and observations made on the day. Since visual presentation can
replace many words, it is preferred than written or essay style since there are no conclusions to be written. It’s just like making a presentation to the boss on a white board at the end of the day but now instead of the white board it is on paper. The boss or your committee might scribble some comments for you to look into and later would pass a copy back to you.
It fast, efficient and instant documented communication. This concise and simple reporting method is an important element of continuous improvement activity that an active organization cannot do without. It teaches technicians, engineers, and project managers to be more objective in presenting daily progress reports so as to leave a traceable track that can be developed into highway as soon as the project is completed.
Using symbols in your presentation, whether it’s on screen or on paper is very effective and could give clear picture to your audiences. Symbols usage had rooted thousands of years before the invention of the modern day’s alpha-numeric writing which I’m using now. Nevertheless, the use of symbols nowadays are still widespread and among the symbols that are popularly used today are the cross (×) and the tick (∕) which carry the universal the meaning of wrong and correct or right respectively. The cross and tick are symbols have been the most useful means of communication between teachers, students and parents for many decades. All ticks in the homework books would make parents proud of the children as they know that their children are good in their studies.
During my early school days I would feel uneasy if my homework books are filled with crosses marked by my teachers, the more crosses I received the more uneasy I’d become. I got on few occasions the teacher would just made a big cross that covered the whole page of my exercise book. I felt like tearing off the page which I couldn’t because the teacher would report my bad behavior to the headmaster.
In daily business communication, the use of symbols have many advantages over descriptive words. Two profound advantages in symbols are first symbols do not occupy large spaces particularly if the presentation is on a spreadsheet and secondly it’s a real time saver as there are no descriptions to be written. There are four symbols that are being used in Total Quality Management in entire Japan, they are the cross, the triangle, the circle and the double circle (one smaller circle inside the circle). These four symbols have powered Japan Industries as leaders in the production of quality products and services.
There are two types of measurements that must be carried out when conducting analyses in today’s businesses; they are either quantitative or qualitative measurements. The quantitative measurement is one that quantifies amount of the items being measured, example are, 5.89kg of potatoes in a bag or $4.12 per piece of screw. While qualitative measurement is commonly made in comparison with a standard or a reference items. It is relative. One example is a par in your golf score can be marked with a circle symbol in your score card or in another example a lighter object against the standard object can be indicated by a triangle in your record sheet. Symbols can be used in most of the qualitative measurements and analyses and in some situations they are most suitable.
The four symbols described above are; first, a cross symbols which means any situation that is totally out of expectation or an action plan that has not started. The second symbol which is a triangle represents any situation that has just taken off or test results that below the expectation and not good enough. When confronted with a triangleor even a cross, more effort must be taken as corrective actions to get the expected results. The third symbols, a circle means situations or conditions that meet the set expectations, such as a par score on a certain hole of a golf round; it can also mean that situations that are under control or a project that is ending with expected results. Lastly the fourth, the double circle or a closed loop is to indicate any situation or condition that is closed or completed. This symbol is also used to indicate above expectation results, like an A+ grade of a test for example.
Projects matrixes, charts and tables can be simplified by utilizing these symbols, they are simple to prepare, easily to understand and a real time saver. 
