We all seem to spend our days either making decisions or sitting in meetings, where we frequently wind up making decisions. We have all the facts we need for many of these decisions or know where to get them. For the rest, we have to make assumptions. In the case of decisions involving your customers, the most reliable source of information is directly from the voice of the customer (VoC), except for a few notable exceptions discussed later.
Some Examples of Decisions With Known Facts
You have been in business for several years and have good data about salespeople’s learning curves and productivity. It is easy to figure out when to hire the next salesperson so you can meet your revenue plan; you know how much sales each new salesperson will generate per month as she learns the products and company, how much she will generate per month when fully trained and how many leads your lead gen. efforts can provide her going forward.
If you are in Manufacturing, you know which step in your process is the bottleneck and what you must invest in to remove the bottleneck. You also know which action will become the bottleneck when you invest in removing the current pinch point. So deciding when to make investments to support your projected demand is straightforward.
Examples of Decisions Without Enough Known Facts
Your business has a well-established product and service suite that addresses many problems common to a large customer base. A company offering a new product they claim is a natural fit for your customers has recently approached you. After reviewing everything, they tell you there are still questions about how your customers will react to the new offer. Someone suggests running an experiment in one geographical or customer area, and you have to make a yes/no decision. In this case, you have another option that is less disruptive and not as likely to tip your hand to your competitors. You decide to brief a few of your critical salespeople on the opportunity and send them out with a sales presentation and a set of questions to see how the customers react. You are collecting the Voice of your Customers.
This is a more straightforward example to get your head around. Based on feedback from transaction VoC surveys, you have to decide if you should extend the hours your call center is staffed and, if yes, how many additional hours per week to operate. Again, contact your key customers and determine the importance of new hours to them, what impact it will make on your future business, and whether there are any alternatives to adding staff that will improve your customer satisfaction at a lower cost than adding people.
Examples Where Customers Do Not Have the Answer
Henry Ford says, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” In a Harvard Business Review blog post titled “Henry Ford Never Said The Fast,” the author concludes that Ford never said it and that when innovating, ignoring your customer’s insights is sometimes OK. Other times can lead to a mess.
The second example is from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement address. While discussing creating a product that did not exist, “…. you can’t connect the dots looking forward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You must trust something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down and has made all the difference in my life.”
My conclusion is that you should always ask, “Can my customers intelligently answer my question”? If you believe your customers can, then you had better go and talk with them and, if not, trust whatever you believe in but keep checking to see if and when you should begin talking again.
To read more about VoC, read this post = They Didn’t Name It Voice Of The Customer For Nothing
About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization create a custom onboarding process where you treat your new customer like a new baby, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.