“Start by understanding customer need then work your way backward to the solution.“ — Steve Jobs
That statement of philosophy pretty much nails what we need to do to succeed with customers. While it’s roughly based on a comment Steve Jobs made in 1997, it has always been true. I’ve tried to keep customer experience at the forefront of my work since my branch days. It’s my guiding purpose and it’s why I use a compass rose as my personal logo. The image reminds me that customer focus is required to attract customers, deepen relationships with them and earn their long-term loyalty.
To deliver on this customer-centric philosophy, I focus my efforts on three foundational activities: Learning About Customers, Aligning Resources With Vision and Measuring Results.
Learning About Customers
It’s important that we know and understand our customers. I start by learning the answers to a few questions: Where do they live? What is their age? What is their education level? What are their needs? From there, we probe deeper to gather more insight–How can we best reach them? What do they do for fun? What websites or publications do they read? How much money do they make? How do they use our products? What annoys them about us or our products? Which of their needs are we not meeting as well as we could? And on and on. Company data will provide answers to some of these questions. To get at the rest, I have undertaken numerous primary research projects requiring the formation of partnerships with internal data & analytics teams as well as marketing agencies and consumer research firms.
Obviously, to be the best provider for our customers, we have to understand their needs better than our competitors. My work learning about customers has led to the development of powerful tools that leverage insights to accelerate awareness, sales and loyalty. These tools make it easier to find customers, win more of their business and earn their long-term loyalty. Best of all, acting on solid customer insight, I’ve consistently been able to improve customer satisfaction and company revenue.
Aligning Activity With Vision
Lasting success begins with a clear understanding of what we want. From there, we can set goals and organize our team members, our investments and our efforts around achieving those goals. Some firms have a great vision of who they are and what they want to become. Others?… well, not so much.
Because it’s hard work to determine and commit to a vision (and/or mission), weak leaders often skip it. But, where there is no leadership vision, massive amounts of time and money are wasted as talented managers and team members earnestly strive to figure out good things to do. Worse, lack of vision creates needless rivalry as team members jockey for position and try to impress the boss with transitory successes.
In contrast, wise leaders invest the time to create a meaningful vision. I enjoy working with visionary leaders in doing this foundational work. Once the vision is clear and leadership rallies around it, I thrive on executing relentlessly in support of it. Work is a pleasure when executives, managers and team members are all working in common purpose. Productivity increases, effectiveness leaps forward and the company enjoys success more often than not.
Measuring Results
If you don’t know how to measure success, how will you recognize it when you get there? Just as foundational as the Steve Jobs quote above is the axiom “where performance is measured, performance improves.” Here again, alignment with vision is critical–of all the things we could measure, we have to ensure that we’re measuring the right ones.
This element of my approach manifests itself in insightful reports, presentations and dashboards that motivate the team, inform executive management, and help me to continually improve my tactics. The numbers are the voice of the business and they do not lie. I listen to that voice, make necessary changes and continue to measure.
A Few Examples:
Here are a few examples of achievements resulting from my approach:
First Niagara Bank
New products accelerated sales 40% in 2014 with continued acceleration in sales in 2015.
National City Corp
New marketing approaches increased sales 41% in one year and doubled sales in three years.
Old Kent Mortgage
New products and pricing catapulted company to #1 U.S. ranking in sales growth over two years.
Contact information:
Alpine Jennings
Senior Financial Services Executive
