{"id":1194,"date":"2021-01-26T15:06:34","date_gmt":"2021-01-26T15:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1194"},"modified":"2021-01-26T15:06:48","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T15:06:48","slug":"make-happy-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/01\/26\/make-happy-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"Make happy customers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last week, I gave a presentation to a company that\u2019s in the midst of a strategy revamp. I always admire leadership teams that take on the incredibly difficult challenge of taking a step back and reviewing how the organization is operating right now and what change in direction is required to achieve future success. As the saying goes, what got us here in many cases won\u2019t get us there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the key discussions was concerned with the R&D resources \nallocated to providing customizations to some of the most important \ncustomers. Large customers often know how important they are to the \ncompany and, as a consequence, typically negotiate very hard for special\n treatment in terms of customization, free services and similar. As \nthese companies provide a significant part of the revenue, the \nshort-term and immediate response often is to go along with their \nrequests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a company becomes increasingly dependent on a small set of \npowerful customers and these customers exploit their power, the \nconsequence may easily be that all R&D resources are consumed by \nproviding customizations and customer requests. The result will be that \nthe company\u2019s offering becomes increasingly commoditized as the R&D \nresources aren\u2019t used for building differentiating functionality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, there\u2019s nothing wrong with listening to your customers and\n understanding their needs and wishes. However, there\u2019s a major \ndifference between \u201ccustomer-first\u201d and \u201ccustomer-unique\u201d features. \nCustomer-first features are requested by customers that are in many ways\n leading and happen to identify the need for new functionality before \nothers. Such a feature will be relevant for more customers besides the \none initially requesting it and hence valuable. A customer-unique \nfeature is functionality that\u2019s only<\/em> relevant for the requesting customer. These features are often a drain on the company as their return is quite low.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the company where I gave the presentation, the discussion led to \nan interesting question: are these important but demanding customers \nreally the right customers for us? In this context, I brought up the \ndifference between \u201cmaking customers happy\u201d and \u201cmaking happy \ncustomers.\u201d The company had worked incredibly hard at making customers \nhappy, but were they really the customers they wanted to serve? Although\n the discussion didn\u2019t lead to a clear conclusion, it was clear that it \nwas far from obvious that this was the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As part of the strategy work that every company needs to engage in, \nit\u2019s of critical importance to identify the profile of the customer you \nwant to serve \u2013 for at least three reasons. The first is that a company \ntrying to be everything to everyone is bound to fail. As you can\u2019t stand\n out and differentiate yourself without focus, the only strategic path \nleft is to be the lowest-cost player, which is a hard game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, strategic investments made by any organization should be \nprioritized such that the skills and capabilities the company has used \nto differentiate itself from the competition are developed further and \nthose that the company needs going forward receive sufficient attention.\n Failing to be strategic in these investments typically leads to a \npoliticized process and a scattered set of results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, as any company needs customers and it\u2019s the sales function \nthat\u2019s delivering these, it\u2019s important to ensure that those active in \nsales are aware of the profile of the customer that the company seeks to\n serve. Failing to provide sales with a clear customer profile easily \nleads to the aforementioned problem where sales has promised customers \nspecific customizations and extensions as part of the process of \n\u201cclosing the deal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, as part of your strategy process, make sure to create a clear profile of the type of customer you\u2019re looking to serve. And that profile may require you to \u201cfire\u201d customers that no longer fit that profile, or at least put them in maintenance mode and not invest in any further customization work for them. In the end, the goal isn\u2019t to make all customers happy but to make the customers that you want to serve happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>), Medium<\/a> or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, I gave a presentation to a company that\u2019s in the midst of a strategy revamp. I always admire leadership teams that take on the incredibly difficult challenge of taking a step back and reviewing how the organization is operating right now and what change in direction is required to achieve future success. As … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1196,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}