Becoming a truly customer-centric organization is perhaps one of the most difficult transitions an organization can make, fraught with hidden obstacles and unanticipated challenges. Here are three potential roadblocks on the path to a customer-centric strategy, and how to get around them.

Failing to understand your most valuable customer
A customer – centric strategy is only as good as its customers. You cant let the average customer dictate what you do, says Robert Duboff, CEO of Hawk Partners LLC and coauthor of the book Market Research Matters. Generally speaking, Duboff says, 20 percent of a company’s customer base generates 80 percent of its profits. Given that split, its imperative to put your most valuable customers at the heart of your approach.

Identifying those customers need not take exhaustive research and complicated measures. It can be a fairly straightforward process, as it is with the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, a metric developed by Bain & Co.s Fred Reichheld. As set forth in The Ultimate Questionwritten by Reichheld and published by Harvard Business Pressthe NPS approach consists of one simple question: On a scale of one to 10, would you recommend us to your friends?

Based on the answer to that question, customers are segmented into three categories: promoters, who actively champion a particular product to their friends and colleagues; passives, who are lukewarm about the product; and detractors, the opposite of promoters. A given company’s score is simply the difference between its number of promoters and its number of detractors.

NPS has proven to be a powerful tool for such companies as General Electric Capital Solutions, which has used it not only to identify customers that are already valuable promoters but to gain insights into how it can convert detractors. For a business like GE Capital Solutions, which serves more than 1 million very diverse customers in many different industries, NPS helps us better understand what our customers are feeling and how we can improve their experience with us, says Stephen White, a spokesperson for GE Capital.

Failing to support your external customer – centric strategy with an internal customer – centric strategy
Speaking of valuable customers, what about that most priceless customer of all your employee?

While most companies aren’t in the habit of regarding their employees as customers, those seeking to instill a customer-centric culture should rethink their stance, argues Elaine Berke, president of Westport, MA based EBI Consulting, which specializes in helping organizations develop customer-centric strategies. Customer – centricity needs to come from the inside out, says Berke. Leadership must avoid a double standard that makes it OK for managers to argue with or demean staff while still being courteous and considerate to external customers.

Consider the case of the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University Hospital. In developing a comprehensive Service Excellence initiative aimed at boosting its level of patient care, the hospital included employee satisfaction as a core component of the program. The hospital conducted an extensive survey to gauge employee concerns that turned up such simple, actionable insights as making it a point to compliment co-workers and instituting criticism – free no negativity days.

Customer-centric organizations value and respect internal customers as much as external customers, says Berke. Like the old saying goes, If you’re not serving a customer, you’re serving someone who is.

Failure to identify the moment of truth
Companies spend considerable time and resources developing metrics for processes, execution and other day-to-day functions but often overlook defining their moments of truth those points at which a customer interacts with a company’s product or service and forms an impression.

Companies are usually very good at creating metrics around [such procedures as] production deliverables but have a much harder time knowing how to create and measure standards relating to the quality of service being delivered, Keith Bailey of Sterling Consulting Group says.

In defining a company’s moments of truth, Bailey suggests looking at three different angles quality of product, quality of procedures and quality of relationships. Taking a hotel as an example, the quality of the product would be the cleanliness and comfort of the rooms. The quality of procedures would be such factors as how it long it takes to check in or how long customers wait for room service. The quality of relationship would be the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff.

Considering each angle separately allows a company to isolate the negative moments of truth within each and develop a game plan for turning them into positive experiences. Procter & Gamble, for example, identified its moment of truth as that instant when a shopper picks up one of its products and decides whether or not to purchase its decision the customer makes in an average of six seconds. The company has overhauled its marketing with that insight in mind, creating a global First Moment of Truth business team designed to win over the customer in that moment.

There are as many different customer-centric approaches as there are customers, and each has its own unique challenges, but the road to a truly customer-centric strategy always begins with the same steps.

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3 years ago we purchased $24,000 worth of appliances and furniture from a major department store. Which included a stove, dishwasher, warming drawer, fridge, washer, dryer, a bedroom set and a kitchen table. This was all going into our brand new home and we were excited.

The problem really was that we ended up purchasing hi end products from a store that only services standard stoves and dishwashers. This whole experience could have been avoided had we simply purchased our stove from a boutique retailer.

After 8 months of dealing with the major department stores service staff we finally gave up and decided to have an outside service company come and look at the stove. The pros as I know call them found out that our stove had been improperly serviced as a simple screw had been lost from the main burner and instead of replacing it was installed without. This caused a host of issues the main one being the glass kept breaking as the burner was now directed towards the glass instead of the food.

I am not saying major department stores can’t provide good service, what I am saying is that sometimes using a boutique outlook will get you better service experience. Price is always the most important thing when it comes to the department store experience, it’s how they have become huge. Their buying power has allowed them to drive prices down and so has the lack of people servicing the product.

Have you noticed that in most cases when you purchase something from a department store that you are part of the building process now. Furniture is a great example, buy that nice table and when you get home you are now part of the assembly line building what you just paid for. I hate the fact that the pricing has become so cheap that we are now forced to build our furniture and barbecues.

Sometimes it’s nice to visit a local shop that is owned by people that are frustrated with the same things you and I are. These store owners appreciate this and do everything in their power to ensure you don’t experience the same thing in their store.

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There are a lot of professionals caught up in a quandary right now. They seem to be searching for a way to justify their loyalty and engagement efforts. They want to gain more ground competitively and showcase more quantifiable results to their company. They feel a bit exposed because much of what they do is “intuitive” and little is quantifiable. However, they are either not sure how to fix the issue or they are unable to get any real information to use/show.

I recently attended an industry tradeshow. I had many conversations about how to select metrics, and how to present results to other company peers and executives. This show confirmed what I have been witnessing for some time – a lack of understanding about how to quantify loyalty results.

I believe it is important to use metrics with any marketing or loyalty initiative. Many business managers use only a yearly customer satisfaction survey, exit surveys or a promoter score. Although these are good, I suggest using more. Utilize a broader spectrum of measures to get a clearer picture. At Allegiance, we deliver a handful of metrics: loyalty, satisfaction, promoter and engagement scores. These improve your read on the situation. Don’t use too many though or you’ll soon go crazy chasing data. You should feel comfortable about how to justify your job, get a raise and show positive economic-related results from your efforts.

You can measure churn, share of wallet, word of mouth, lifetime value, etc. The simplicity of net promoter is good because it brings the conversation into the boardroom in a way that people can understand. However, the backlash on net promoter is also deserved. It is just too simple to be the only metric to use for business decision making.

The other important item to consider when trying to justify success is looking beyond statistics and dashboards. What does the data really tell you? What decisions have you made that drive business forward as a result of having that data? Too many people say: “our net promoter score is such and such” or “our allegiance engagement index is this” and they leave it at that. A static measure only tells you half of the story.
It’s good to have a point-in-time measurement, but it’s even better to know what drives those scores, and build a best practice that allows you to understand what you can do to impact those scores.

For example, understanding why a customer buys the attitudinal part of the relationship you have with them will help you to really serve them better. Here’s an example from my paper “Do you know why your customers really buy?”:

An organization always assumed their most engaged customers were of a middle aged demographic. Through segmentation analysis, they discovered that one of their most engaged groups was their early adult group. Knowing this information, and understanding what drivers lead this group to be engaged, the company launched new marketing and product initiatives to better serve the early adult group and ensure their engagement remained high. They were also able to identify that both the early adult and middle aged groups became disengaged with the company after 2 years as a customer. They held focus groups and launched surveys to study why this happens. Knowing this information allowed them to change this pattern to impact long-term engagement and profits.

I like to talk to marketing, sales and loyalty pros about understanding the attitudinal side of relationships better. They tend to focus more on the transactional side too much. The “who, what, where, when, and how” of a relationship is important, but so is the “why.” I encourage anyone involved in enterprise feedback management to seek out attitudinal information. To learn more about how to do this, get a free copy of my paper.

Terence Fugazzi is the VP of Demand Marketing at Allegiance (http://www.allegiance.com). His company provides Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) solutions that help organizations grow and increase profitability through improved customer and employee loyalty and engagement.

The catering process starts long before the flight departs. As a corporate flight attendant, you are responsible for submitting the request for food to the caterer you use in a city and in overseeing the preparation of the food at the caterers facility. Then you have to make sure the food is transported to the aircraft properly and then you need the know-how and experience to prepare and present this food onboard.

Personal hygiene is of utmost importance in a corporate flight attendant in the preparation of food during the flight. This is to ensure that all the food served to passengers is germ free so that it won’t cause any gastrointestinal illnesses either during the flight or just afterwards. The main thing you have to realize is that the food is cooked when you receive it and the part you play in cooking the food on the plane is to reheat it. There are certain things that you must keep in mind when doing this.

1. Always make sure the oven is heated to the right temperature before you put the food inside to reheat it.

2. Do not uncover the food in the reheating process because this will cause it to dry out. Always use a liquid in conjunction with the food to keep it moist.

3. Use a temperature probe to ensure that all foods are heated all the way through.

When you are serving food and drinks to the passengers, there are safe practices that you must use as well. Always hold the glass by the base or the stem and never let your hands touch the rim. If you are pouring drinks from a jug, the rim of the jug should never touch the top of the glass or the cup.

That being said, the types of meals involved in catering onboard an aircraft also mean you need to have training in the proper way to serve these meals. You should be able to display the food on the plate in the same manner as it would be if the passengers were actually eating at the caterers restaurant. The caterers chosen for supplying the meals are ones well known for their unique menus and the manner in which the food is presented on the plate. The passengers will also know which caterer is supplying the food, which is why these caterers are involved in the training of corporate flight attendants for the preparation and serving of their foods.

For more information on corporate jet catering, corporate flight jobs and executive jet jobs, visit http://www.CorporateFlyer.net

I recently stayed at a hotel in southern Utah. Two days after my stay, I received a survey request from them. I like this particular hotel chain, so I had no problem opening the survey and giving them my feedback. They had a nice little progress bar on the screen so I knew exactly how far into the survey I had gone. After three or four pages of multiple ranking pages, however, I was still only 40% complete. The next page had 15 ranking questions on everything from their toiletries, to the beds, to the TVs, etc. I bailed out of the survey.

There are two issues in how the hotel should have designed their survey:

1. The hotel knew who I was and from my profile, should already have known whether or not I was a frequent business traveler or a pleasure/family traveler. Knowing that, they should realize that getting frequent survey responses from me would be very valuable to their business, but also knowing that I am a business person with very little time, they should ask, at most, no more than 5 questions. They could have easily asked me 5 questions out of a set of 20 and by doing this randomly across all their business travelers, still have received the feedback they desired. This would especially be true since their abandonment rate would probably drop by a factor of two or three.

2. Even if the hotel did not know I was a business traveler, they still should have done the same process outlined above because hotel stays are generally a repeated service. This means unlike, for instance, a car purchase, you are likely to repeat business with them more often than once every few years. Common sense says that recipients of surveys who have made higher dollar, more infrequent purchases will be more likely to tolerate a longer survey. If you are a provider of a more frequent service, you want to design a survey that is quick and easy for the recipient to take so that you will get feedback EVERY time you deliver that service.

So, use common sense when surveying. Understand your recipient. Spread the feedback items across the audience, especially when the sample size and frequencies are high. Know your key goals and cut questions that are not absolutely necessary to meet them.

Terence Fugazzi is the VP of Demand Marketing at Allegiance (http://www.allegiance.com). His company provides Customer Engagement Software that helps organizations grow and increase profitability through improved customer loyalty and engagement.

The study finds that customer focus is a top strategic concern for many businesses today and is ranked as one of the most important needs concerning issues ranging from leadership challenges to ethical behavior and innovation. Yet it also reveals that there is a wide disparity between what activities companies practice when it comes to customer focus and what they should be practicing.

The study asked respondents to rank a variety of strategic actions in each of five areas environment/culture, communications, HR practices, measurement and organizational practices in terms of what their companies are doing now and then to rank those same actions in terms of what their companies should be doing. Here is a closer look at the results for each of the five areas.

In environment/culture, having the support of top management ranked number one in both the should-do and doing-it-now categories. On the surface this would appear to be a heartening result leadership is doing what it should be doing.

But that good news is undercut by the number two should-do action: having leaders set the example with customer-focused behaviors. This is only number four in the doing-it-now category, meaning that while leadership may nominally support customer focus, it is not necessarily supporting it with its actions. Perhaps that helps explain why including customers in our corporate value statements ranked number two in the doing-it-now category but only number six in the should-do category; mission statements are all well and good, but its action that counts.

In the communications area, Magnifying Customer Focus finds that companies are falling short of communicating the customer focus message internally. Respondents ranked the action of having an internal plan in place to communicate customer insights number four in the should-do category, but only number seven in the doing-it-now category, suggesting that many companies are missing this crucial component. Its important to note that this doesn’t simply mean leadership handing down memos. It means employees at all levels of the organization must share their perspective and facilitate feedback from the customer so the company can get a true picture of the state of its customer service.

Companies are placing too much emphasis on market share as an indicator of customer satisfaction, according to respondents results in the area of measurement. Regularly measuring market share ranked third in the doing-it-now category, but eighth in the should-do category, strongly suggesting that respondents believe this particular metric is of little value when it comes to gauging customer satisfaction. Bain & Co.s Fred Reich held has gone even further in questioning the relevance of market share as a reliable measurement of customer satisfaction. Reichheld maintains that although companies may capture market share and generate considerable revenue from dissatisfied customers, it is actually more costly than profitable in the long run to do so.

When it comes to HR, expecting employees to anticipate customer needs ranked number one in the doing-it-now category and number three in the should-do category. It seems that while the respondents believe this strategic action is important enough to be included in the top three of actions that should be taken, it is not the overall most important action. That distinction belongs to providing customer-oriented employee training, an action that ranked number one in the should-do category and number three in the doing-it-now category, a surprising result considering the number of customer service training programs currently in place. The takeaway from this seems to be that while companies may think that they’re addressing customer service training needs, they are in reality falling far short.

While the organizational practices area is a broadly defined subgroup with substantial overlap with the other four areas, it did produce some interesting results of its own. For example, responding to demands for customization and personalization ranked eighth in the doing-it-now category but ranked only twentieth in the should-do category. Customization and personalization have been hot topics lately, with many proclaiming them the next big thing, but clearly the survey respondents consider them overrated as a customer focus issue.

Conversely, the tactic of being customer-focused at all customer touch points, not just sales and customer service ranked fourth in the should-do category and twelfth in the doing-it-now category, revealing a large disparity between its perceived importance and the extent to which its executed.

That point an urgent reminder that customer focus needs to be instilled throughout the organization and not isolated in one or two departments serves well to sum up the entire survey.

Management Training Centre provides professional development, motivational seminars, leadership and executive training and career training programs for HR professionals, supervisors and employers.

1. Speak to the budget of your prospect
2. Itemize your packages offered for easy comparison
3. Full disclosure

Prior to writing your proposal, you of course need to find out why your prospect invited you in for an appointment or agreed to take time on the phone to speak with you.

The initial conversation puts you, the vendor, in the position of a consultant. You need to dig deep through questioning to discover all of the problems your prospect is experiencing.

In turn, you question further to find how each problem is affecting other areas of their business. Only after you ask all of the relevant questions for the situation, will you be able to determine if your services are a correct fit and that you can indeed help.

It has become apparent that some industries do not know to ask for the budget of their prospect. Instead, these suppliers simply assume they know what is needed and that the money is available to accept the proposal.

The belief of these vendors is their prospect would not have inquired about their services in the first place. Nothing is further from the truth.

When it is your turn to speak after uncovering the needs of your prospect, ask upfront,What is your budget? If you do not ask this frank question, you may well be wasting your own valuable time putting a proposal together and presenting it.

Your prospect may have designer taste or a budget so low they cannot possibly afford the services offered. You will frustrate the prospect to the point where they walk away.

The second element of a proposal is line items. Your proposal should clearly indicate everything that is included. If you provide individual pricing for each service then that should itemized. If you instead provide a package, be certain every element is carefully listed in the package.

Provide as much detail as possible so that your prospect knows exactly what is to be expected. Your prospect needs to know exactly what they will be receiving in exchange for their money spent.

To improve your success rate for sales, relationship building throughout the sales cycle is also a critical element.

The biggest error on a proposal is omission. Omission of expected items in the package will cause your prospect to not walk away but run.

Some vendors purposely omit or are vague about what needs to be included. They hope to begin the project and mid-way through announce an extra element is needed which allows them to add money to their bottom line.

This practice only serves to spread bad word of mouth and hurt business on a bigger scale than just losing one prospect. Honesty is still the best policy.

Upon working with a kitchen designer, an associate was given a proposal to update his old tired-looking house. Jim initially told the designer he was on limited income and the improvement needed to be modest. He was never asked precisely what he had in mind. Instead, the designer said she understood.

The proposal came back being thousands of dollars over the expected amount. Jim told her the numbers needed to be redone.

Jim and the kitchen designer finally came to agreement however Jim said he needed to check one more source before signing. The second vendor asked the question, In addition to the cabinets, how much are the counter tops?

Jim called the first company to ask if the counter tops were included in their proposal. He thought, how would a kitchen design be complete without the counters? To his dismay, Jim found out the counter tops were a never-before disclosed extra charge and not included in the bid.

Jim walked away thanking his lucky stars he never signed the paperwork.

Elinor Stutz, CEO of Smooth Sale! and author of Nice Girls DO Get the Sale selling worldwide, speaks, trains and coaches.

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Effective follow-up begins immediately after the sale, when you call the customer to say “thank you” and find out if he or she is pleased with your product or service. Beyond this, there are several effective ways to follow up that ensure your business is always in the customer’s mind.

1. Let customers know what you are doing for them. This can be in the form of a newsletter mailed to existing customers, or it can be more informal, such as a phone call. Whichever method you use, the key is to dramatically point out to customers what excellent service you are giving them. If you never mention all the things you are doing for them, customers may not notice. You are not being cocky when you talk to customers about all the work you have done to please them. Just make a phone call and let them know they don’t have to worry because you handled the paperwork, called the attorney or double checked on the shipment – one less thing they have to do.

2. Write old customers personal, hand-written notes frequently. “I was just sitting at my desk and your name popped into my head. Are you still having a great time flying all over the country? Let me know if you need another set of luggage. I can stop by with our latest models any time.” Or, if you run into an old customer at an event, follow up with a note: “It was great seeing you at the CDC Christmas party. I’ll call you early in the new year to schedule a lunch.”

3. Keep it personal. Voice mail and e-mail make it easy to communicate, but the personal touch is lost. Don’t count these as a legitimate follow-up. If you’re having trouble getting through, leave a voice mail message that you want to talk to the person directly or will stop by his or her office at a designated time.

4. Remember special occasions. Send the regular customers birthday cards, anniversary cards, holiday cards – you name it. Gifts are excellent follow-up tools, too. You don’t have to spend a fortune to show you care; use your creativity to come up with interesting gift ideas that tie into your business, the customer’s business or his or her recent purchase.

5. Pass on information. If you read an article, see a new book, or hear about an organization that a customer might be interested in, drop a note or make a quick call to let them know.

6. Consider follow-up calls as business development calls. When you talk to or visit old clients or customers, you’ll often find they have referrals to give you, which can lead to new business.

With all that your existing customers can do for you, there’s simply no reason not to stay in regular contact with them. Use your imagination, and you’ll think of plenty of other ideas that can help you develop a lasting relationship.

Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant with career sales over $25,000,000. His “Top Ranked” Earn Money at Home Directory gives you all the information you need to start and prosper with your own Internet Home Based Business.