Getting close to the customer involves gathering facts and knowledge about your customers (current and potential) in order to develop an awareness of what customers want from you and how they perceive your organization and its products or services. This awareness in turn enables you to continuously strive to meet your customers' demands and secure your organization's long-term survival and profitability.
(article continued below ...)

Being close to your customers allows you to:

• respond to changes in demand and in the market; 
• act on facts instead of hunches or intuition; 
• develop products or services better tailored to your target market;
• achieve improved sales and increased profits. 

The advantages of being close to your customers far outweigh any disadvantages, but you should take the following factors into account:

• The better you try to get to know customers, the more you risk intruding on their privacy. 
• If you ask a customer to reveal personal or valuable information, you'll probably have to offer a reward or benefit in return. 
• Customers may resist telling you personal information and may not always tell the truth. 
• Surveys and research can be costly and time-consuming. 

If the culture in your organization does not support a customer-focused approach, implement a program of long-term culture change.

Remember that every section of your organization has customers. Staff in direct contact with external customers cannot provide effective service without the internal support of colleagues all along the chain. To encourage internal service departments to adopt an outward-looking customer focus, their operators might work for a week or two in the department they service.

Customer focus needs to pervade every level of the organization. How often do your key decision-makers and strategy formulators deal face to face with customers? A period on the front line would increase their awareness.

You will probably wish to compile a database of your customers so you can profile your customer base.

• gender -- particularly where the purchaser or end user is not the sole decision maker; 
• age -- different age ranges being more susceptible to targeting by some products than others; 
• marital status -- especially combined with other factors such as children and disposable income; 
• home ownership -- indicating specific needs and responsibilities that relate to buying patterns; 
• location -- urban consumers differing from rural ones, and regions differing culturally and economically; 
• lifestyle -- since all customers have individual activities, interests, and opinions. 

These factors become more useful when they are analyzed in combination -- for example, home ownership, age, and number of dependent children can indicate the likely amount of a customer's disposable income.

Decide how to approach your customers to find out their basic characteristics. It may not be possible to ask every customer individually, but other fruitful approaches exist, for example:

• market research 
• questionnaires 
• user- or focus-group discussions 
• customer audits 
• attitude surveys 

Take advantage of opportunities to meet business customers at their premises or at yours in a series of open houses or customer care programs or through membership of user groups, industry liaison meetings, or partnerships arising out of new product development.

• make untested and unwarranted assumptions about what customers think; 
• rely on weak anecdotal evidence; 
• accord too much weight to atypical complaints. 

If you don't make the effort to find out what your customers think, you can be caught off balance when they go elsewhere. If you don't know why they are going elsewhere, you can't identify corrective actions. Besides factual information about your customers, find out:

• why customers buy your product or use your service; 
• how they use it; 
• what their opinion is of your product or service; 
• why they choose your offering over the competition; 
• what their experience is of your product or service in terms of performance and after-sales care. 

Attitudes and opinions are hard to quantify, and many factors influence a decision to purchase or to remain loyal to a particular brand. Customers may be influenced as much or more by their impressions of service -- courtesy, promptness, etc.-- as by the quality of a product. Exploring these issues requires detailed research, and if you do not have adequate in-house expertise you may wish to use an external research agency.

Be sure to listen to your frontline staff, who are on the end of firsthand comments from customers about their satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Consider setting up a procedure for reporting this information.

Channels usually employed for customer service can also be used to solicit customers' opinions by an open dialog that is meaningful to the customer. Such channels include customer charters, warranties, statements (and monitoring) of performance standards, open and willing acceptance of penalties for noncompliance, and refunds in cases of nonsatisfaction.

Paying attention to your customers' needs is an ongoing process. Consider setting up a regular research project, introducing methods of soliciting customers' suggestions and creating response mechanisms, or initiating procedures that constantly monitor your market.

Feedback is not a onetime event. It needs to be a continuous process that informs customers of your organization's response to suggestions, mistakes, and new ideas and that encourages further dialog.

=========