Focus on Customers and Their Requirements throughout the Business
Article 2 discussed the importance of satisfying business stakeholders, especially customers.
In this article, I explain customers and the need to focus on their requirements and expectations in more detail.
Is it enough to put slogans on the walls of our business, such as "The customer is king" or "The customer is our first priority"?
We must also do something to support these slogans and claims.
One of the first steps is ensuring that customer orientation, or customer focus, is understood and practiced throughout the business.
What does that mean? Every employee must know their role in, and effect on, customer satisfaction. They should be able to explain it and describe how they put it into practice.
Remember the earlier example of a cafe receiving a customer's order for fried eggs. Let us examine that example again in greater detail.
1- The dining-room attendant or order taker: what is their role, and how can they affect customer satisfaction? Think for a moment before reading the answer.
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Their most important role is clearly to collect enough information about the customer's order and pass it to the kitchen: how many eggs, butter or oil, runny or firm yolks, and so on.
But this person is also one of the few cafe employees in direct, face-to-face contact with customers. That means:
- Appearance matters: how clean, tidy and well-groomed they are.
- Behavior matters: posture, hand and body movements, not scratching themselves or touching their nose :) and so on.
- Their manner of speaking matters: being friendly, polite and patient.
- Their communication and negotiation skills should be appropriate for the role! What does that mean? They do not just take orders; in a way, they are also the cafe's salesperson and marketer.
So, if an ordered item is unavailable, they must be able to offer a good alternative.
If a new product has been added to the cafe's range, they should introduce and recommend it appropriately to customers.
What else?
If a customer is visiting the cafe for the first time, they should recognize that and have a plan.
If a customer is a longstanding regular, they should have a plan for them too.
If customers are newlyweds, have a small child, want to work on a laptop or read, are celebrating a birthday, are very hungry or are in a hurry, there should be a plan for all of them!!
Do you see how customer satisfaction is achieved?
That was only one employee. The same issue must be considered for every employee.
Are we finished with the dining-room attendant or order taker?
No! Everything mentioned above concerned the business's external or end customer. There is another customer, the internal organizational customer: their colleagues.
For the cafe attendant, the main internal customer is the kitchen, which expects customer orders to arrive complete and clear so that it does not have to replace items or redo work.
Naturally, the attendant is also expected to maintain good relationships with colleagues, work as part of a team, be supportive, and so on.
Exercise: adapt the cafe example to your own business. Choose one employee and identify their role in customer satisfaction and how doing or avoiding particular actions can satisfy their customers.
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