Your Fast Guide to Customer-focus self evaluation Lost your customer focus? Never really had one? Use this Fast Guide to gauge the urgency of your need to become customer-focused and thus sharpen your competitive edge. Customer-Focus is an aligned whole-organization approach to customer satisfaction and service. Strategy, Processes and People are all customer-aligned: Every action is shaped by a relentless commitment to meeting and exceeding its' customers expectations regarding product and service quality. Internal processes are constantly evaluated and improved to meet or exceed those expectations. Employees are aware of their role in maintaining a valued relationship with their customers. The following organizational manifestations signify a lack of focus on customers. If you observe any or several of these in your organization, it would suggest that your customer-focus is lacking or slipping. 1. Customer Satisfaction Measurement - Voice of the Customer Having insufficient or no customer satisfaction measurement; no platform for a data-driven improvement plan; no measures for each contact point. 2. Customer Focus Saying and meaning that customer-focus and customer satisfaction is important, but not having a clear strategy and/or improvement game plan; delegation of improvement ownership by CEO to functional managers. Managers not “walking the talk” and behaving like leaders. Realizing that improvement efforts and plans are focused more “inside-out” rather than “outside-in”. Having started a customer-focus initiative, but feeling that it is faltering, it has lost steam and needs ramping up. People being insufficiently “turned on” and committed to deliver legendary service. Seeing service quality improvement as a program rather than a holistic organizational redesign process that requires fundamental change and endurable commitment from management and employees alike. 3. Customer Alignment Developing and implementing a brand strategy in a services business - but not fanatically managing "moments of truth" - a service brand’s promise is at stake each time a customer is served. External service to customers is seen as important, but internal service remains lacking. Experiencing blockage due to misalignment between improvement goals, and strategy, people, process and customer. 4. Link to Results Being focused on service quality improvement programs rather than outcomes: “Activities versus Results Focus” (The means appear more important than the ends) Having a number of improvement initiatives and programs underway, but your people don’t see cohesion and connections

Source:  Eric Fraterman of Customer-Focus Consulting. Eric helps clients achieve increased customer-focus and operational effectiveness by ensuring that the voice of the customer is captured externally and deployed internally, so that business operations, people and supporting processes work together to deliver customer-value. While being Toronto (Canada) based, Eric has worked for a wide range of clients in Canada, the U.S., Korea, Mexico and Holland. He can be reached at: eric@customerfocusconsult.com

Links:  A more detailed customer-focus self evaluation can be found on Eric’s website (www.customerfocusconsult.com). It consists of scoring 40 statements and will only take some ten minutes of your time. At the end of it you can conveniently and quickly compare your scores with the averages of those who completed it before you.

Your turn. In the spirit of raising performance thresholds in customer service, if you have a Fast Guide of your own to share with eCustomerServiceWorld's Best Practice community, email it to PhilDourado@eCustomerServiceWorld.com.