How to Unite Your Organization in customer focused annual Planning, Part 2

In Part Two, Jeanne Bliss, CustomerBliss, shares how to unite your company to know your customer.

By Jeanne Bliss

In the last segment of “ How to Unite your Organization in Annual Planning…” Jeanne Bliss, CustomerBliss founder and consultant, discussed the importance of consumer and employee trust, as well as, democratic decision making. In part 2 of this series, Bliss focuses on the importance of knowing the customer and their lives. Many market research techniques involve ethnographic research, where teams go to lengths to get to know the consumer as thoroughly as possible. Some of these techniques can be used to bond with consumers and walk in their shoes. Bliss gives examples below.

4. Grow and invest in customers as a primary asset of your business.

Talk about customers lost and gained in real numbers, not percentages, to illustrate the vast number of lives your business impacts. Understand what drives customers out your door, as well as their long-term potential. Zane’s Cycles in Connecticut has experienced more than 20 percent growth every year for 29 years, with 45 percent margins because the retailer never loses sight of the fact that its customers’ average lifetime value is $12,500. Valuing customers makes it easy to make decisions about how to treat them.

5. Know your power source for bonding with customers.

Regularly connect with customers, not only through surveys and other feedback mechanisms, but also as they experience your products and services. Take a page from Trader Joe’s, which uses employee taste buds at its testing kitchens, customer “tasting stations” in stores and sales performance to determine products they stock. Trader Joe’s generates $1,300 in sales per square foot–twice the supermarket industry average.

6. Have clarity about how you uniquely serve customers’ lives.

Unite your operation to ensure that decisions connect to deliver an experience customers want to repeat and tell others about. This ties cross-silo decision making together and releases the organization from excess bureaucracy. IKEA, for example, designs the price tag first because employees at all levels know that the store serves customers who have less money than sweat equity, so are willing put together their items themselves at home.

7. Deliberately walk in your customers’ shoes.

You need to know your customers’ life to serve their life. Yet as people rise through the ranks or even join organizations, orientation is often more about process and policy than learning about the customer at the heart of the business. Be deliberate in establishing a process for new hires, such as insurer USAA, which require new “recruits” to wear the flak jacket and helmet that many of their enlisted customers wear and to read their letters. All this is done so that when calls come in employees first connect with the customer, and then conduct the process of the business. Ninety eight percent of its customers stay with them year after year.

Jeanne Bliss spent 25 years reporting to the Presidents of Lands’ End, Allstate, Mazda, Coldwell Banker and Microsoft Corporations leading customer experience as their Chief Customer Officer. Today she runs CustomerBliss, a consulting firm to help executive teams unite their actions to drive customer growth. She is the co-founder of the Customer Experience Professional’s Association. Her two best-selling books are “Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to passionate Action” and “ I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.”