How Customer Focused are you?     (really...)

Click here to assess yourself...

For the last thirty days I have been trying to find a business contact that did not consider a high degree of Customer Focus to be a critical success factor.  No surprise, I didn't find any.

What has been really interesting is the conversation that follows.  First it was necessary to get past the "what an obvious question" initial reaction.  Then the dialogue turned to how Customer Focus performance is actually measured.

While it was quite easy to talk about (wax eloquent even), hard metrics were few and far between.  How do you measure Customer Satisfaction?  How often do you formally measure it?  What are your Customer Service standards?  Are your employees aware of them?  Are your customers aware of them?  What are the top 5 reasons your customers buy from you?  What are the top 5 reasons they decide not to buy from you?

How do you formally collect and analyze customer requirements?  What is your "Customer Share" (like market share, but measured for an individual account) for your top 25 customers?  What is their "Lifetime Value" to your firm?  What is the quality of your relationship with each key decision maker?  How often do your top execs meet face-to-face with their customer counterparts?

As the questions continue, the level of discomfort increases.  It's simply too easy to deliver the lip service and never get around to the methodical nuts, bolts and metrics of true Customer Focus.