What do customers really want? Figuring this out can be a struggle for some businesses.
Obviously, what they want – the thing – is going to vary massively from customer to customer, business to business. Some customers want a coffee, some want electrical work done and others want a shopping mall built.
Beyond the thing – what do customers want from you? From your business?
It should be straight-forward, but so many businesses get these wrong in practice. Just like many sports, success in business is often achieved by doing the fundamentals well. These are fundamentals. If you’re good at these things, you’ll have an advantage over your competitors.
You won’t get accolades for doing them well – customers expect them. But you will get irate customers if you do them poorly.
These four principles are researched backed. Over multiple years Gallup surveyed billions of customers – yes, billions – and cross-industry, these items emerged as common important factors for customers1.
Number 1: Accuracy
Customers expect you to get it right, every time.
Being accurate and delivering what the customer expected is critical – if you don’t get this right, it doesn’t matter how friendly your customer service is, your customer won’t be happy.
Accuracy extends to all elements of the customer relationship.
- Check the customer knows what they’re buying – and that you’ve recorded it correctly.
- Provide what they expected – what’s contracted – to an acceptable level of quality.
- Invoice correctly.
Some industries seem to know this innately. If I order a latte at a coffee shop, and I’m given a long black (americano), most coffee shops would fix this immediately. In more complex industries, it’s harder to be accurate. There’s more at stake. You need more details on the order, scope or contract. It needs to be clear.
How do you ensure accuracy? Good systems and clear processes with the correct checks and balances. And when errors do happen – it’s critical that the people customers have access to are able to fix the problem quickly, and in complicated scenarios where your customer service staff can’t fix it, escalate to somebody who can.
Number 2: Availability
If you don’t have the availability for the customer to buy what he wants, he’s not going to be able to be buy it. And many won’t wait.
Or worse: if the customer can’t even get hold of you quickly enough to start the buying process, you’ve effectively made your product unavailable, even though you may have a warehouse full of products or enough staff available to service them.
Be available. It matters.
This starts from the first point of contact. How quickly can you respond to a sales enquiry from your website? The next day? How about the same day? Could you respond within 5 minutes? Many businesses focus on their maximum response time: we’ll aim to respond to you within 48 hours. That might be fine for exceptions, but can you target as close to an immediate response as possible?
Ensuring that you have enough product available for customers can be more challenging. In some industries, it’s more simple: a coffee shop should always have coffee beans, and that’s easy to manage even though they’re perishable, because they’re quick to order and there’s a realistic limit to how much you can use.
It’s much harder for technology products, where carrying too much inventory carries the risk of obsolescence. Reducing the number of product lines, and increasing the speed of fulfillment can reduce this risk.
The hardest industries for availability are human service based: IT services, law, engineering, accounting and similar. You need to carry a small amount of slack2 capacity within the team to take on new work quickly, but not have too many staff idle so that you’re losing money. However, the opportunity cost of short-term profit-maximisation will be the inability to take on new clients that don’t want to wait for availability3. If you want to grow, you need some slack capacity.
There are real, valid business challenges behind availability being challenging. For the most part, customers don’t (and shouldn’t) care. In many industries it’s just not possible to have immediate availability.
But it’s your responsibility to maximise the availability for your business – otherwise you’ll likely lose customers.
Processes vs Culture
All four of these items need you to have good people.
The above two items can be solved with good processes.
The next two depend heavily on your culture you’ve established at your organisation. Process alone won’t solve them. Also, they’re irrelevant if you can’t get #1 and #2 right. Partnership doesn’t matter if you’re inaccurate and don’t get the work right.
Number 3: Partnership
Customers want a partnership with the companies they buy from.
What do I mean by partnership?
- Genuinely listening to them,
- Being responsive to their needs, and,
- Aiming for the same outcomes as them.
Too many times I’ve found myself in a situation with a salesperson I was wanting to buy from, explained exactly what mattered to me and what I wanted so they could help me …
… and then they carried on talking about something irrelevant, clearly not having listened to me at all. I’m sure you’ve experienced the same.
That’s not partnership. Many organisations say they do partnership – it’s extremely common for B2B sales organisations to say so – but few really do. They often just want to sell their product without caring if it helps the customer achieve their goals.
Customers see straight through it.
Genuinely listening to a customer, being responsive to them and helping them solve their challenges is like a superpower in business. It turns customers into fans and makes them stick to your business.
Number 4: Advice
Advice is the most advanced level of relationship customers want. You can’t short-circuit to the advice stage. For advice to be effective, you need to be accurate, available, and operate in partnership with the customer.
Giving advice is helping a customer to learn. It’s teaching them something useful that helps a customer with their situation – even when that is beyond areas that your company might service or supply. It helps them figure out something new, and helps them to make better decisions. Good consulting organisations do this naturally, as part of their service is giving advice. However, it applies to all organisations.
Teaching a customer can take many forms. It could be a casual one to one discussion, or it could be something more formal – group training or videos. In Australia, Bunnings does this very effectively at scale, from equipping their staff in store to offer advice, in store training sessions and a huge library of online DIY instructional videos.
Customers have the closest bonds with organisations who help them learn. What advice looks like for your business is going to vary depending on what the business is.
How well does your business do?
How does your business perform in the four key items that customers want: accuracy, availability, partnership and advice? Do you approach them in order, or are you lacking in accuracy while attempting to perform well in partnership?
Ensuring you perform well in these in your business can help to ensure your customers are getting the right experience when they work with you. And when you adjust a business process for anything that touches your customer, it can help to look at it from this perspective.
- As important as this stuff is, it’s buried on page 137 of First Break All The Rules. ↩︎
- Slack, not slackers: spare time within the team to take on new clients without immediately having to hire additional staff. ↩︎
- I’ve run an IT service business, and there are definitely valid reasons to run at full capacity at times. The most common would be if you have a high short-term workload but you expect it to taper off rather than grow. ↩︎