The Upwardly Mobile

No matter who you are and what business you’re in, you don’t know your customers well enough. I can’t overemphasize this. You don’t know your customers well enough.  What makes matters worse is, your customers are always changing, so you never will.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though.  Understanding this concept and integrating it into the heart of your bussiness operations always yields powerful results that can increase sales, eliminate waste, and connect you with your customers, suppliers, and employees in ways you’ve never imagined.

A few months ago, I got hooked on one of the most powerful business concepts I’ve encountered: Entrprise Lean / Six Sigma.  I had heard about Six Sigma before, and I knew it was a strong operational concept that worked for big companies like Toyota and GE. What I didn’t know was that EL/SS had been steadily growing outside of the manufacturing sector, and that firms whout any manufacturing business whatsoever had been changing their processes and connecting with customers with staggering results: 90% increases in operational efficiency without firing anyone, doubling of sales and halving time-to-launch for new service offerings, and significant increases to the bottom line.

One of the most powerful concepts behind Six Sigma’s Lean Thinking is the idea of customer pull.  Pull, in a nutshell, is the idea that, rather than creating a product or service and pushing it to your customers through oldschool advertising and PR or even newschool buzz campaigns, you let customers pull products from you. Pull is about having a relationship with your customers that allows you to cater your service precisely to their needs. The surprising thing is, Lean companies are realizing they can actually create customized products and services while continuing to decrease costs.  They’re realizing that being lean means increasing margins while selling customized products and services that don’t cost their customers more.

But what does all this mean for today’s service business?  Aside from learning all you can about applying Six Sigma to service businesses, it also means fundamentally adjusting your firm’s attitude about a whole host of business issues.  The first of these is your customer relationships.

You don’t know your customers well enough, and, because your customers are always changing you never will.

Accepting this maxim yields surprising implications.  If your customers are always changing–if your old cutomers change their preferences and your new customers have totally different expectations–then your firm will need to interact with customers at surprising level if it’s going to build lasting relationships and continue to sell services.

Examples of firms who have accepted this are everywhere, and the results are self evident:

• Amazon realizes that it can never know its customers well enough, so it implemented an automated system for customers to rate products and give feedback.  The system gives customers something back directly: increasingly good product recommendations and the ability to see what other customers think about a product before buying it.
• Lands End realizes it can never know its customers well enough, so it takes the time to actually talk to them. When you call Lands End, to place an order or return one, they ask you how they can help and they actually mean it.  I was ordering a Christmas present for my parents a few years ago and they asked me if I thought there was anything they could do to improve their business.  When I suggested that the Lands End line had about the best quality I could find but was “a little old” for my tastes, they took note.  A week later, somebody actually called me back to talk about it and get my feedback
• Emergent Energy, a small renewable energy consulting and development firm, realized they’ll never know their customers well enough either, so they implemented a revolutionary way to talk to them right during the design process. Emergent’s charrettes allow them to integrate customer feedback into the design of their wind turbine sites and get feedback instantly.  What’s more, their customer relationships prove it works.