Principle 3: Customer Perception of Value (Item 2)

Providing what your customers value – now and in the future – must be a key influence in your organization's direction, strategy and action.

Dissatisfiers

You must have a very good understanding of what your customers don't like about your products and services – the dissatisfiers. For example, you should ask your customers "what is it about our products and services that you don't like?"

The main questions you should ask your customers are about what they do not like. Find their dissatisfiers. These usually give the real clues to vastly superior service.

When you say "what is it about our products and services that our customers don't like?" you acknowledge that your customers might not like every little thing about your wonderful product. When you do this, you find very real gems of information. This gives considerable advantage for companies that do this.

What do your customers dislike about the service you provide? Everyone likes good news and so businesses usually only ask for what their customers like about the service they provide. This will give you a warm feeling, but no information on which you can work. The gems are in the dislikes!

You can work out how to improve what you offer by asking what your clients dislike. This can take a fair bit of courage. However, if you can find out their dislikes, it allows you to modify your service to better meet their needs.

Find out what your customer do not get and give it to them

What about all those people who are not yet customers that could be? Why aren't they your customers? What about your ex-customers? Why aren't they your customers now?

Surveys cannot give you any of this information! Finding out about dissatisfiers needs dialogue — face-to-face. Watching and listening. Use surveys to measure satisfaction — use face-to-face to find out needs.

How would your customers respond to these questions?

• What do you dislike most about dealing with this company?
• What about our products and service is not value for money?
• What don't you like about our products and services?
• What about us don't you trust?
• What about our service stops you from doing your best work?
• What about our service causes you to lose money?
• Does our response, delivery time and payment terms meet your needs? What would you prefer?
• Do you feel respected?
• Do we demonstrate values that you like?
• Are you treated fairly?

Customer contact staff and dissatisfiers

You may not even have to go to much expense to find your customer dislikes and dissatisfiers. Your sales and customer contact staff usually have a very good idea of what your customer dislike. They get told every day.

You must

• encourage, enable and empower your salespeople to report your customer's daily problems and dissatisfiers
• provide processes so that you can listen to them reporting on what goes wrong for your customers
• have processes to take this input and cause improvements in your products and services so the dissatisfiers disappear.