Our world is full of slogans, so why not use them for our customer-focused initiatives? Unfortunately, slogans are just words and they do not provide the essence of what is needed to build a customer-focused organization. Frankly, just saying something doesn’t make it so.

Every business wants happy customers and strives to turn them into best customers: ones that provide repeat business and becomes your biggest advocate. They work to ensure that the correct employees are in customer-facing positions, put in place reward systems to drive their customer-focused strategy and share customer feedback and stories with the organization.

In-depth customer knowledge is also a key requirement for innovation, commercialization and business success. It boils down to how you are contributing to the success and growth of your existing customers, and how you are positioning yourself for the success and growth of your new customers. So, what you share with your employees about your customers is crucial to your customer-focus strategy. Next time, spice up your team meetings with discussions on the following items.

Define your ‘value’ from the perspective of your customer

Businesses exist because they deliver value to customers through their products and services. Your customers do not buy your product; they buy what your product and firm offers them: a solution to a problem, improvement from their current solution, better performance and quality, feeling of comfort, security, image and overall value. The price premium that your brand commands and your competitive advantage is what your customers value and are willing to pay extra for. How are you incorporating that value into your product development process, your firms services and offerings?

Lifetime value of your customers

We are all human, and our natural tendency is to relate, personally and socially, and build lasting relationships. Your customers are not interested in one-time transactions: they want to know that they can trust you, that you will treat them fairly and that there is a mutual respect. At the same time, with globalization and the Internet, they also know that they have choices.

Lets say a new customer walked through your doors. Do you know the average lifetime value of that customer to your business? How about the cost of acquiring that new customer? Think about it, how many new customers has your business lost over few dollars, bad customer service experience, unintuitive website or misrepresentation of your product capabilities? More importantly, how do you share that knowledge with your employees?

Go beyond requirements

It is all too familiar: marketing requirements, functional requirements, architectural requirements, … But customers don’t buy requirements, they buy products and services to get a job done. They measure the benefits of your product and service against how well, how fast, how cheaply, how profitably and how reliably that job is done.

In What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, Anthony W. Ulwick outlines that for an innovation process to be successful, firms must understand what jobs/activities/tasks are the customers’ pain point, what outcome they are wanting to achieve and the potential constraints that stop the customer from using your product and service. Aligning this knowledge with your firm’s brand value is the foundation for creating loyal customers. To obtain this intimate knowledge, one needs to go beyond the ‘voice of the customer’ and actually walk a mile in your customers’ shoes.

Know how your customers judge your value

Your development team needs to know your product and service’s performance measures to design and test the product against. Your customers may not be able to articulate this beyond some standard measures: Megapixels? I dunno, just want to take quality pictures with an easy to use camera. But, how do you define and measure image quality or ease of use?

I enjoy working with customers throughout the development process. Alpha and beta tests are also great way to collect and understand what customers value, how they use and interact with your product. However, they are late in the development cycle and can be a challenge on schedules. With that, how you incorporate and learn from your customer research is even more important for your learning organization.

Know all your customers

Do you know all your customers? How well do you understand their jobs, pain points and what keeps them up at night? Just think back to the last time you were at Staples looking at purchasing a printer. Even though those products are targeted to consumers, the distribution channel partner is also a customer. The lack of readily available information about these products in the store is amazing, considering how much this literature will help make a sale. Yet, the store should be concerned about making quick sales and providing good customer service without increases in staff or training costs.

The distribution channel partner is an obvious example. Your customers may vary between obvious, unobvious and opportunistic ones. Examples could include the kids that are buying products for their elderly parents or companies that want to utilize your services for their promotional needs, such as advertisement placements on buses. Think about all customers of your products and services, and address and balance their needs and pain points.

Grow with your customers

Life is about change. Stay connected with your customers and continue to deliver value as their needs, desires, values and tasks change and evolve. If you don’t, your competitors will.

Technorati Tags: customer knowledge, innovation

Previously I wrote about Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan’s comments on innovation and how it will impact management practices and organizational design.

Now you can visit HBS Working Knowledge to read and comment about how you see the future of management changing: Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?

It is no doubt that innovation and the drive to continuously innovate is changing the way work is done and where it is done, how groups are led and organized, and how creativity is encouraged and tapped. Technology is also playing a key role in facilitating this situation, whether it is through social networks, forums, virtual meetings, development environments or knowledge management tools.

However, perhaps the biggest challenge to the future of management will be big corporations and all their bureaucratic bloated supporting departments. As important as the management process itself is to innovation, the alignment of the supporting organizational structures, such as the HR department, is just as vital in order to succeed.

Brought to you by the “Rambling Blogs” department of Kitetail.com.

Technorati Tags: future of management, HBS

First of all, this is no ordinary Shopping Guide! It is The Better World Shopping Guide: Every Dollar Makes a Difference which shows that how you spend every dollar can make a difference in the world.

Ellis Jones compiled an easy to use quick reference guide that can help us steer businesses towards becoming more environmentally conscious and socially responsible. The author shares key information and tips for each area where we spend our money, as well as highlighting how companies are doing relative to one another. Though it is not a comprehensive list, it is a great start. Here are some unfortunate tidbits from the book:

• Here is another good reason to switch to fair trade and/or organic chocolate and coffee: child slavery is involved in the production of up to 40% of all chocolate in the industry, and coffee farmers are on the brink of starvation. Nestle is the corporate villain, which is also #6 in the top 10 worst companies.
• Wal-Mart is #3 on the top 10 worst companies list. Their bad deed includes documented exploitation of child labor, and major toxic waste dumping fines.
• General Motors is #1 polluter in the auto industry. I wonder if they would have maintained that #1 position, if they instead invested the $50M in their operations rather than paying the lobbyists.
• You may have noticed the cigarette industry is heavily targeting the developing countries. If you have to smoke, try American Spirit. They use 100% additive-free tobacco, along with other socially conscious activities.
• Who would have thought vitamins and animal welfare would be related? Centrum (Wyeth) is a corporate villain due to numerous federal ethics violations.

You can check out the better world shopper for more top 10s, sources used for compiling this information as well as a downloadable version of this list for your iPod.

So, what does this have to do with Helvetica, a documentary on typography? Before I jump to that, Helvetica is a delightful movie. The documentary gives a different perspective into something we tend to take for granted everyday: fonts and our emotional connection with them. It is all about the world that Helvetica (Neue Haas Grotesk) was created in, how it appealed to modernists, post-modernists and captured the interest of creatives that continuously push the envelope with design.

A company’s brand is its one of most valuable asset. Brand is a set of intangible values, such as beliefs and attitudes, that differentiate a firm’s product or services from another firm’s. For customers, brand highlights the additional value that they will receive from that firm.

Finally, here is the connection. During the documentary, Helvetica was referred to as the font of choice to give brand image the illusion of having social responsibility and accountability, even if that may not be the case. I know I am now paying more attention to the typefaces used in corporate communications. What do you think, is there a connection?

Technorati Tags: the better world shopping guide, Helvetica, brand

Lets say that your Product Marketing manager stopped by for a quick chat, and as she is leaving she drops a bomb: “Lets implement CIP4’s JDF in the next product release.” Thankfully, you have enough self-control and can resist the urge to let numerous four-letter-words fly out of your mouth… Instead you nod your head and respond, “That’s an interesting idea. Let’s make time to talk about it more.”

Throughout my career, I had opportunities to interact with standards at varying degrees: leading the definition, and implementation or usage in my products. Though each one was fun, challenging and unique on its own way, my JDF experience definitely makes to my top 3. You see, JDF is an immense 850-page (about 3” thick) standard that covers anything and everything that relates to digital printing and the graphics art industry. So, when it gets dropped on your lap, you do take it seriously for various reasons, one of which is to keep your engineers from fainting (or quitting) on the spot.

Standards seem to trigger a love-hate relationship between marketing and engineering. This is mainly true for standards that are defined and sanctioned by a standards organization body vs. de facto industry standards. This tension can be better understood by looking at the benefits and challenges of implementing standards.

Benefits of standards:

• Standards enable interoperability among diverse and often competing products and services. Even though fax machines existed in the mid-to-late 19th century, it wasn’t until implementation of related standards (as well as reduction of cost of technology components) that they became popular in the 1970s.
• Interoperability helps encourage and build an ecosystem of complementary products and services. In many ways, it can also lead to the success of an industry. The examples span from AC outlets in your home, to the Bluetooth headset for your phone, to the USB connection on your printer.
• Customers value open standards. From their perspective, proprietary standards (or lack of standards) lock them into a product, service and/or a vendor combination. Their entire investment could be at risk if a product is discontinued, or as their needs change they may not be able to grow with the same vendor.
• Standards allow firms to focus their resources on what really counts and what differentiates them from the rest of the pack.
• Standards can drive commodization, which enable off-the-shelf availability of these technologies, tools and services. By leveraging this, you can reduce your time to market, improve overall quality and reduce your costs, such as in the case of first IBM-PC.
• Firms’ strategic direction and competitive differentiation can be built on standards, such as in the case of QualComm. Standards can help you drive your partnership approach to building an ecosystem of complementary products to enrich your technology and products.

Challenges of standards:

• Standards organizations are often comprised of competing firms, and as such the result can be viewed as just good enough, where it is built on the lowest common denominator of ideas and approaches.
• As it is a standard, it is difficult for a vendor to differentiate just on the standard alone. After all, standards are meant to level the playing field. The implementation may be limited by the standard, and lack the ability to incorporate innovations or to improve in any one performance vector. If a firm decides to add these performance vectors, such as using custom extensions, often they will break the standard, as in the case of Microsoft with Internet Explorer.
• Standards and the certification required to get your logo can be expensive. Often there are proprietary technologies that can accomplish the same task without this extra cost. It can be less costly to go with a generic RF transmission system than to be certified to the Bluetooth standard.
• The fact that a standard exist doesn’t mean it is useful or correct. Not all standards organizations take interoperability and the validation process very seriously. This does contribute to a reduction in the overall usefulness of the standard, and reduces the chances of follow on versions.
• Too often a standard is nothing more than a line item on a product data sheet. As a result, it consumes precious resources from the engineering department while not adding to the overall product competitiveness or functionality.

I personally appreciate standards as they contribute to solution ecosystem that can enrich my customers’ businesses. Here are some ways that I have learned to improve the overall standards implementation experience for the businesses that I worked in.

• Take time to educate your organization. Make sure every functional group understands what the standard means, how it enhances your product and service, what are the benefits that can be derived from the standard (benefit) as well as what it would take to implement it (cost). Too often the cost of implementation is underestimated while the benefit is over-exaggerated. So, use the education process to set appropriate expectations and align the organization.
• Analyze how the standard can be best incorporated into your product line. While the interoperability and automation may be your core competency, specific technology implementation may not be. Leverage existing resources and partners to improve time to market and overall quality of your implementation.
• Recognize that a given standard has a specific version, interoperability conformance specification and potentially other related implementation rules and guidelines. One of my pet-peeves is developing to a standard that is half implemented. Imagine putting on your product sheet “Supports standard abc version xyz, except for the following sub-sections: …..” If parts of the spec doesn’t make sense or are not useful, take it up with the standards body and improve it.
• In many cases, a given standard can open up opportunities for the overall business that didn’t exist before. In those cases where it can become a strategic differentiation for your business, such as building partnerships and alliances to enrich your overall product offering, push your organization to take advantage of it. You can also utilize these partnerships to validate the interoperability of your implementation. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.
• Decide what your overall position will be in regards to this standard activity. Is it yet another line item, potential participation in the committee, active involvement in the definition of the standard or an opportunity to lead the standard’s definition. This decision can be especially important where you have a competing proprietary solution: do you compete against the standard with your proprietary technology, do you maintain both technologies in your product line, or do you incorporate your proprietary functionality into the standard and discontinue yours at some point in the future.

In summary, though standards can be an irritation for your organization, they also can represent a strategic opportunity for your technology, your products and your firm. As a technology manager you get paid the big bucks to determine how best to take advantage of standards and incorporate them into your technology and product roadmaps. Enjoy the ride.

Technorati Tags: standards, requirements, logo compliance, interoperability, ecosystems, standard vs. proprietary, level playing field, standards as strategy