A Customer Metamorphosis: How Do You Become Your Customer?

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

At Baldrige examiner training this year, we put a lot of emphasis on stepping back from simply practicing creation of a key product (writing strength and opportunity for improvement comments for applicants of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award) in order to view the product from the eyes of the customer. In other words, we practiced morphing into a customer and viewing our product from the customer's perspective in order to ensure that what we were producing was what the customer really wanted and needed.

Since 2009, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program has been surveying its applicants for the Baldrige Award using a net promoter score. Such a score is considered a measure of performance through the eyes of customers, who can be divided into three categories: promoters or loyal enthusiasts who will continue with and refer the program, passives who are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers and are vulnerable to competitors, and detractors who are unhappy customers. We have been asking our award applicant customers about their likelihood to reapply for the Baldrige Award, how relevant they found the Criteria for Performance Excellence, and how useful the feedback reports they receive are in helping them improve, among a few other key measures. While our scores were role model in the first two areas, they were just the opposite in the feedback report category.

Through additional surveys and in-depth interviews, we expanded our knowledge of what Baldrige Award customers are doing with our product (in this case, the comments received in feedback reports) and what they need and want. For example, we know the following:

• When we give an award applicant a comment about the strength of a process, the applicant understands that the process is something that Baldrige examiners feel it should continue to do. And process examples provided in the comment will be considered best practices of that applicant.
• When we suggest to an award applicant that it may have an opportunity to improve a process, we need to convince the applicant to invest in improvement. For example, can we show that not investing in this process might affect the applicant's sustainability, cause it to lose customers, or cause it to lose market share?
• When we point out an applicant's most beneficial results that support its mission or vision, applicants understand that they should continue to invest in achieving these results and tracking particular measures.
• When we point out results that the applicant may need to improve, we need to really convince the applicant to invest its limited resources in improving that particular measure. And to convince the applicant that certain results are critical, we need to provide comments that point out the issues to which the results might be tied: for example, the issues that might be keeping the CEO up at night, the issues that might be holding the organization back from improving, and the issues that the organization might need to focus on for sustainability.

Your customers' perspective and what they need and want from your products and services are the focus of category 3 of the Criteria for Performance Excellence, which asks how you listen to current and potential customers, how you determine their satisfaction and engagement, and how you engage customers to serve their needs and build relationships? 

So how do you know, from a customers' perspective, if your product or service is meeting your customers' needs? How do you know what your customers desire from and are doing with your products and services?

Comments

[Dave Klater]

Marie, how do we get more information about the survey you discussed here?

[Jack Priggen]

good stuff!!
ok... now that you know (through your survey process) what your customers want, can you tell us how you improved your processes in response to this feedback... your bullets tell what you found out you need to do to meet the customers' needs; how are you actually doing it??

[Dawn Bailey]

Jack,

Thanks for your comment! We’ve done a lot to revamp and refine this particular product for our customers. Upstream, we have revamped the way we teach comment writing to our examiners. During a month of training in May, examiners practiced writing comments and offering feedback from the applicants’ perspectives--trying to move away from using too much “Baldrigese” in comments. We’ve redone many of our e-modules, tools, and other resources used by examiners to better focus on the voice of the customer. We’ve also used all of this feedback in internal strategy mapping and planning to ensure that we are focusing resources on delighting our customers; this strategy mapping is an ongoing process that we just reported on to the Baldrige overseers and judges to ensure we were on the right track. We are seeking feedback from applicants throughout the award process, as well, to ensure the new way we are writing comments is something that works. We’ve also been training staff on both how to guide examiner teams in comment writing and what are the elements of a good comment, especially viewed through the eyes of a customer who may not be familiar with Baldrige.

Dawn

[Jan Englert]

May we ALL include our customers in the day to day business of achieving excellence: Regina Holiday, artist and wife of a young patient who died as a result of many broken parts of our healthcare system.... was a keynote at Premier's recent national meeting...she painted and blogged about Premier's QUEST hospitals and the difference in striving together to effect change! ALL Baldrige folks should see this!
http://bit.ly/rdDjsR

[Philip Jackson]

Focus on the trends. It's an existing factor in determining what the customers want and need. Nowadays, the trend is new technology. That is why many companies are making advanced products that aim to provide everyone their needs. Innovations are widely accepted, since people are always interested in new things!

[hostess milano]

Your blog is awe-inspiring. I have found many new things. You have elected very incredible topic. I appreciated it.
I feel affection for it.
Your blog is distinctive. I have found your blog innovative. You have chosen very incredible theme for your sketch. I cherished it.
Well done! I am gratified that you have shared this important news with me. Thanks!

[std testing]

Inspirational blog. It is one of very well written blog where you described everything very clearly. I got many new things to learn. Much appreciated post. Thanks for sharing :)

[Ben Benjabutr]

I would say there are lots of way to understand voice of customers. Traditional questionnaire and face-to-face interview still work. More advance version is Social CRM, the software collect data from social network, find hidden pattern and interpret the result about customer's requirement.