Thinking about the Customer s Customer

Thinking about the Customers Customer

One of the best pieces of business advice I have ever received has been the importance of talking with ones customers and understanding their business and their pressures. To increase your profits, you have to design your services to give your customers an edge over their competition. You always have to follow things down the line and you must pay attention to the needs of your customers customer.

Implementing the plethora of feedback a company receives from its customers can appear to be a daunting task; however, this is critical information which can actually be used to develop additional profit centers. Through interviews with potential customers and meetings with existing customers, we obtain this information by having a company representative ask them what they would like to see from us and where we are having the most problems. From here we try to understand and fit this information into our short, medium and long term goals.

The next step is then looking inside the company to determine how to best get a critical mass of resources to offer the new service. Finally, identifying someone to lead the new effort and giving him or her support to remove organizational barriers is important to actually make the changes work.