Directory Menu Information

Selecting A Commercial Roofing Contractor Category:   Los Gatos Dentist Should You Get Veneers? Category:   3 Reasons Why People Fail in Network Marketing Category:   Garage Door Repair - Extension Springs Category:   Is Ameriplan Business A Pyramid Scam? Authority Success Reviews Category:   Utah Awaits Reforms in Family Health Insurance Category:   Plastic Surgeon - Advice to Help You Choose Category:   Read your favorite Manga series online Category:   5 Highly Effective Tips For the Beginning Blogger Category:   Play Online Bingo Wisely Category:   How to Earn Residual Income on the Internet Category:   Watch New Zealand vs Australia Live Stream online Rugby Tri Nati... Category:   Top 3 Most Important Uses for a Bike Category:   3 Quick and Easy Strategies to Get More Traffic To Your Network ... Category:   How Solar Panels Produce Electricity Category:   Moving vs. Remodeling Your Current Home Category:   Network Marketing - Affiliate Marketing Category:   Best Alaska Fishing and Lodging Category:   Abdominoplasty for Mommy Category:   Watch New Zealand vs Australia Live Stream online Rugby Tri-Nati... Category:   Need-To-Know Guide on Touch Phone Technology Category:   Running Antispyware Category:   Network Marketing Tools - Discover These Network Marketing Tools... Category:   The Key to Success With Women - Preparation is the Key to Succes... Category:   Simple Link Building Mistakes to Stay Away From Category:   How to Convert Your Passion into a Lucrative Career! Category:   Nose Surgery And The Deviated Septum Category:   House Cleaning Caddy Category:   Watch New Zealand vs Australia Live Stream online Rugby Tri-Nati... Category:   If I Could Meet Myself For Lunch Category:   Interest Continues to Rise in Miami at the Online Sportsbook Category:   Availability of Arrest Records Free Online Category:   How To Spot a Fake Bakugan Category:   Former Vestas Employees get Second Wind with Opening of New Sure... Category:   The Fastest and way to Get a Boom Truck from I - 80 Equipment. Category:   How to Collect Hollywood Memorabilia. Category:   It's Not Just a Water Heater Category:   Find Doctors with Whom You Feel Comfortable Category:   How to Buy Sports Memorabilia Online Category:   Altec bucket Trucks now at I-80 Equipment. Category:   House Cleaning - Why You Should Hire a Company Category:   Collecting Football Memorabilia. Category:   Learn SEO Category:   Banish Your Frizz With A Brazilian Blow Dry! Category:   Website Optimization Category:   Could Hair Replacement Be The Answer To All Your Problems? Category:   The Low-Down On Hair Thickening Products For Women. Category:   House Cleaning: What To Look for in a Professional Service Category:   Internet Marketing Secret? - Is It confirmed? Category:   How to Throw Darts Category:   Cleansing Your Colon - How Colon Cleanse Weight reduction Suppl... Category:   The Perfect Themed Billiards Lights Category:   Find a Physician - Know Your Resources Before You Search Category:   What to Look For in Pool Table Lights Category:   Hiring a House Cleaning Service Category:   watch FREE online Rugby Bledisloe Cup Match | Australia vs New Z... Category:   Undesirable Credit rating Loans Instant Decision - Fast Funds Fo... Category:   Washington Weddings License Category:   Useful and Important 4gb sd Category:   Is Jonathon Budd a MLM Jumper? Category:   Corporate Training gives you the more access to quality training... Category:   All you need to know - renting a flat in Bromley Category:   Personal Injury: Qualities to Look for in a Lawyer Category:   What A Handyman Will Cost You Category:   Choosing a Wedding Planner for Your Arizona Wedding Category:   Personal Health Care Quotes Category:   Know More on Pike Fishing Category:   There is No Business Like Web Business Category:   watch online HD TV live Rugby Bledisloe Cup Match | Australia v... Category:   Best Low Glycemic Load Recipes Category:   Sort Out Legal Hassles Via Los Angeles Bankruptcy Attorney Category:   The Border Patrol Category:   P90x Review - Building Muscles Category:   Awesome San Francisco Kitchen Remodeling For Current Market Category:   Breast Lift Scars Category:

Gaining Critical Insight to Grow Your Business Sponsored Links Gaining Critical Insight to Grow Your Business curtis@predictiveconsulting. By Curtis Bingham Category: 0 Submit your Articles Here! curtis@predictiveconsulting.com. Best regards Curtis Bingham http://www.predictiveconsulting.com Gaining Critical Insight to Grow Your Business Introduction Declining prices and margins. Decaying sales. Unprofitable customers. Lackluster market performance. Does your company suffer from these maladies? The solution to these may not be spending more money on advertising, replacing the VP of sales and the rest of the sales force, or further cutting costs. No, the answer may lie somewhere else entirely—and if recognized and addressed, may resolve all of these symptoms. The problem may actually lie in the way that your products and services are designed, developed, delivered, and refined. Who drives these activities? Is it Engineering? Management? Support? Sales? If the customer is not in the driver's seat, your revenues, profits, and even your company may be at risk. The problem may well lie in the fact that companies don't understand their customers—what they need, want, and most especially, what they are willing to pay for. Without this understanding, companies do not know what products/services to offer, or how to market and sell to prospects. The only way to guarantee increased revenues, stronger, longer, and more profitable customer relationships is to center strategic decision'making on actionable customer insight. 1.1 Symptoms Some of the symptoms that companies face that are operating without sufficient customer insight include: * Declining margins and prices—Price and margin are excellent measures of a company's ability to make its value proposition successful in the market. Too many companies do not recognize when the market no longer values its offerings and resort to price cuts or other margin-cutting promotions * Decaying Sales—A company out of synch with changed customer needs will suffer as sales decay. When customers are harder to find and sales are more difficult the reason is often than a company has not driven customer knowledge far enough into the company processes. Adapting everything a company does from product development to core metrics of business health to customer value is a key strategy to reinvigorate a company's economic engine. * Unprofitable Customers—Often companies, particular those that have been successful, do not know what a good customer looks like. Many companies grew in different economic times by taking the business 'came in the door' but have not yet invested in insight about what kind of customers are good ones. * Lackluster product/service performance—Lack of market adoption clearly means the product or service missed the mark and does not adequately solve customer pain. Customer knowledge needs to pervade a company's management of its innovation in product, markets, and business extension. Every company has to be alert to opportunity in these areas because growth is a broad based challenge—simply doing one thing very well is no longer enough. * Most companies have only two communications channels with customers: sales and complaints. Both of these are important—companies need to sell and customers need ways to seek redress—but neither tells a company what the customer needs to make them successful. To ensure success, you must continuously deliver what you know your customers and prospects need, want, and are willing to pay for. There are four steps to success in this process: 1. Proactively Listen to Customers in an Organized, Meaningful Fashion 2. Make Customer Data Actionable 3. Drive Customer'valued Change Throughout the Organization 4. Measure Effects of the Change The first step is critical for the success of the remaining three. 2. Customer Insight Conduits™ The fastest way to overcome the problems described above and gain real insight into what customers need and want is by establishing Customer Insight Conduits™These Conduits help bridge the gap between company capabilities and market or customer needs. Customer Insight Conduits™ are defined as channels through which information passes primarily from customers and the marketplace to a function within the company that is able to make data actionable and drive customer-valued change throughout the organization. These conduits provide an early-warning system for problems. As problems are recognized, the Conduits serve as a diagnostic tool to help fully understand issues and determine the efficacy of solutions. In addition, the Conduits are a measurement vehicle to assess overall customer value and other metrics. Customer Insight Conduits are an early-warning system, diagnostic tool, and a measurement vehicle. 2.1 Examples * Customer advisory boards—Ensure that these are composed of economic buyers of your products/services from an appropriate sampling of the customer base. Some companies rotate the membership every 1-2 years to ensure fresh insight * Technical advisory boards—These should be comprised of the "use buyers", or those who are actually going to be using your products or taking advantage of your services. >From these, you obtain valuable, on-the-street insight helpful to develop/refine products. * Customer conferences are actually sales conferences where companies roll out their new products, hoping to convince customers to upgrade. Garland Hall, the Chief Customer Advocate of webMethods, a company that provides enterprise integration software to major companies, uses customer conferences to gather customer insight and further cement customer relations. webMethods invites customers to present ways in which they are using webMethods' products, share insights and issues with product managers, etc. * Guest Customers—webMethods uses "Guest Customers", where customers present info on themselves and how they are using products to groups within the company who don't normally have customer contact (i.e., accounting, operations, etc.) * Product or service "proving grounds"—LL Bean invites outdoor guides to a special weekend escape where they try out new products and give focused and even harsh feedback. * Host/Monitor chatrooms and discussion boards—Mercury Interactive's VP of Services, Patrick Saeger, does an excellent job of gleaning ideas and identifying problems through the company's product discussion forums. Significant "thought leaders" can be identified and used to gather insight and ultimately champion products and services. * Customer Hall of Fame—Laurie Long, the Sr. Director of Customer Success at Unica organizes a Hall of Fame to reward customers for innovative use of their products. Winners are chosen after review of applications by outside analyst community. This offers the customer recognition from the vendor, other customers, and from the analyst community. * On-site assistance for a day—Companies with a strong service/consulting component should send an engineer, consultant or other appropriate person to a customers' site for a day to simply help them gain the full benefit of your product/service. They can glean huge amounts of insight in doing so. * Sales and support channels—Send the sales people out to find answers to specific questions. Have the support or call center representatives poll their callers with a 1-2 question survey. Leverage these channels to gain answers to specific questions as part of an overall information gathering effort. These are only a handful of Customer Insight Channels™ that could be leveraged as a key component to help gather customer data that is then converted to insight, made actionable, and used to drive strategic, customer-centric change throughout the organization. 3. Conclusion The only way to overcome the maladies discussed previously is by listening to customers, making insight actionable, effecting change, and measuring change. Using Customer Insight Conduits™, companies can gain critical insight and when made actionable can: * Develop successful products and services * Differentiate from competitors effectively * Improve prices and margins * Attract & retain more profitable customers * Identify & implement appropriate success metrics and incentives ---------------------------------------------------- Curtis N. Bingham, President of The Predictive Consulting Group, helps organizations dramatically increase customer acquisition, retention, & profitability. For more information about his new Customer Experience Audit, Customer Strategy, or Chief Customer Officers, visit his website at http://www.predictiveconsulting.com or his blog at http://www.curtisbingham.com . Gaining Critica 0 Subcategories Computers & Internet > Year 2000 Problem > Social Science > Critical Theory > Year 2000 Problem > > Critical Theory > > Gaining Critica 0 Articles