All about customer focus: Practical Customer Focus! Customer focus in practice

In practical customer orientation, you ask the customer first

Ask the customer. It's as simple as that. Customer-centric working always starts with setting up a feedback loop. Customer-centric working presupposes that you want to know what your customers want, expect and how they experience being customers. The essence of customer-centric working is that you simply ask them and use the input you get from that.

An ongoing feedback loop has the advantage that you constantly see the results of the improvement processes that have been initiated. You get the input for practical customer orientation from sun research. In our extensive experience of conducting such surveys for various clients, we see the surprisingly fast results this method achieves. Every month, based on the results of the previous month, we take joint improvement action. What you also achieve is that you secure support within the organisation because the successes are after all visible and tangible.

Set concrete and realistic goals

Based on an ongoing feedback survey, each month you can determine what you want to achieve next month. What do we need to do this month to achieve higher customer ratings next month? What do we need to do now to get fewer questions about wrong invoices next month? The moment you ask your customer these questions, you immediately have the right input for the improvement process. A customer feedback survey thus becomes a flexible instrument with which you measure what you really want to know at that moment.

The potential for improvement is generally in process improvements. Implementing process changes takes time. For example, do customers often call because their invoice is incorrect? Then, to make this invoicing process more customer-centric, you will have to go deeper. What is not correct, or is it correct but the communication around the invoice is not clear. Two completely different steps in that process that if you don't probe further lead to the same customer questions. To improve such a process, you need good customer feedback and a good translation of that input into process improvements. We see that with such complex processes, improvements and their results are not visible in the first month.

Celebrate successes

As processes often cross departments and business units, it is important to share and celebrate successes. Often, there is no process owner because processes are cut into pieces. It is then difficult to get all owners of sub-processes equally enthusiastic and above all: to keep them enthusiastic. It is therefore important to share successes and achieved results in a way that is tangible for all involved.

In short: Keep it simple, but certainly don't underestimate customer-centricity. Ensure support within the organisation and keep everyone involved. You can achieve this by showing concrete successes. Set concrete, realistic goals and share and celebrate the resulting successes!