Management Questions

To understand whether digging deeper into your customers’ full experience might create value for your company, consider these questions:

• Do you use internal metrics that define quality and link directly to your customers’ experience?
• Do you have a clear sense of the end-to-end life cycle of your customers’ interactions with your company and of each touch point between them?
• Do you know the relative importance that your customers place on those interactions?
• For the most critical interactions, do you know with certainty how important good, better, and great performance is to your customers?
• Do you have a strong sense of your customers’ minimal expectations for those critical interactions?
• Do you know how well you’re performing relative to your customers’ minimal expectations?
• Do you have a good handle on the potential opportunities created by an improvement or the potential risks created by deterioration in various aspects of your performance?
• Do you have an effective measure or proxy measure for calibrating how well you are meeting customers’ expectations?

If you can’t answer yes to most of these questions, it may be time for you to revisit your customers’ experience of your company to discover what truly matters to them–and how much.

Source:
Winning by Understanding the Full Customer Experience
by David Rickard
Boston Consulting Group, March 22, 2006

52No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/29/customer-experience-and-satisfaction-questions/Customer+Experience+and+Satisfaction+Questions2007-04-29+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

Goal of CRM Implementation

• Is the main goal of the CRM system to guide future behavior of the employees of the organization to shape the future (increase sales, number of satisfied customers, number of new leads generated, reduced turnover of key sales personnel, etc.) or to predict future sales so that the company can position itself appropriately to meet the expected demand? (These two uses of CRM are separate; using CRM in both of these ways at once may even require separate, but integrated planning teams)

Defining Your Customer – The Key Questions

• Who are your ideal customers?
• Who are your ideal prospects?
• How big and numerous are these customers or prospects?
• How many offices do these customers or prospects have?
• What is the management team’s style?
• When were they last in the press?
• Do you get their company newsletter?
• Who are their customers and what products do they offer?
• What are their pain points?
• What are their business goals?
• Who is their ideal customer?
• What does their strategic plan (either written or still stuck in wetware) suggest they will buy from you in the foreseeable future?

Training – The Key Questions

• What training and appreciation for CRM will be required by our sales persons and management in order to maximize the likelihood of a CRM system implementation contributing positively to the organization’s bottom line?
• How will our sales persons, armed with this system, know how to approach a client or potential client and bring back the data we need find to put into the CRM system and at the same time do what it takes to close the sale?
• How will the added duties of putting all potential clients and their data into our CRM system impact our employee’s workload and how can we prevent it from overwhelming them?
• How will the need required by many CRM systems for all of our employees to log all sales and service be met?
• What about related scheduled appointments, impromptu meetings, input written comments on all appointments and the “status” of all clients and potential clients?
• How will all of this new data entry work impact the “real job” of selling and servicing the client or prospect?
• How do we get the “buy in” of all key users of the system?
• How do we insure that the system rapidly dispenses information to all key users that is a 5x or 10x return on the time, energy and pain that a CRM system causes them to deploy in the name of “working for the system”?
• How do we properly train employees to use and benefit from the CRM system and what is the right budget for this training?
• How will the CRM system we deploy compare with the system our competitors will be using in six months or a year?
• How will our customers be impacted if we ask them for significant data for input into our CRM system?
• Will our customers or clients require training and does our company have either the market power or relationship capital to get our customers to comply with our requests rather than merely going to a competitor with less onerous “customer requirements?”

Source:
The Disciplines of CRM
by Herb Rubenstein
The CEO Refresher

51No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/28/crm-questions/CRM+Questions2007-04-28+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

To make sure that you are defining your company’s performance through your customers’ eyes, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do we know how our customers evaluate our performance?
• Do our internal measures reflect our customers’ assessment of our performance?
• How does our performance compare with that of our competitors from our customers’ perspective?
• How are our customers performing in the eyes of their customers? What are we doing to help or hurt our customers’ performance?

Source:
Customer Focus: Making It Happen
by James P. Andrew
Boston Consulting Group, September 26, 2001

50No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/27/defining-your-companys-performance-through-your-customers-eyes/Defining+Your+Company%27s+Performance+through+Your+Customers%27+Eyes2007-04-27+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

Defining / Establishing a Relationship

• What is the collaborative purpose of our relationship? In the end, what should our efforts together yield?
• What does the client value in the relationship? What’s most important to them? Why is it important?
• How exactly will we work together? What’s the relationship look like when it’s functioning optimally?
• What are our respective roles? What are the reasons for these roles? Define them clearly!
• How, specifically, will we know if the relationship is working – how will we measure our success?
• What will we do together to ensure that the relationship is continually improving?
• What will we do if it starts to falter? What are the “deal-breakers”?
• How often will we review our relationship and how?

Reviewing a Relationship

• Do you trust us to get the work done to your expectations and standards? To make sound judgments about spending your money? To do what we say we will do? To live up to our Relationship Mission? And if we’ve faltered in any way, how can we rebuild the trust between us?
• Are we communicating effectively? Do we keep you well enough informed or do you sometimes wonder where things stand? Are we forthright and square with you when it comes to the tough issues? Are we proactive enough?
• Is the level of commitment what you expect it should be? Do you feel you’re getting our best all the time? Are we keeping all those promises we made when we were soliciting your business? Is there tangible dedication to ongoing improvement, even when there are no apparent problems?
• How well do you think we respond to opportunities?
• When we begin a project, do you feel we both have a clear understanding of who will do what, what’s expected, and what the terms and conditions are?
• What’s your sense of our collaborative business judgment when we’re working together?
• How good a job do we do together identifying critical issues?
• What can each of us do better to make sure we always achieve the best possible results?
• Is the relationship improving, deteriorating, or staying about the same?
• As candidly as we can, let’s discuss how comfortable or uncomfortable we are with things at this point.
• What are the biggest obstacles you feel we must overcome together?
• If you could immediately change one thing about our relationship, what would it be?
• When our conversations reveal that there are ways to get better, do we improve when we say we will?

Source:
The Five Cardinal Sins of Client Relationships
by Joe Grant
The CEO Refresher

49No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/26/client-relationship-questions/Client+Relationship+Questions2007-04-26+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

To determine whether your organization is aligned with your markets and customers, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does our company have multiple divisions selling to the same customers?
• Are there formal or informal processes that coordinate companywide policies for interacting with customers?
• Can we easily get complete information about all the products and services that we are selling to a single customer?
• Are we seizing every opportunity to offer customers our company’s full range of products and services?

Source:
Customer Focus: Making It Happen
by James P. Andrew
Boston Consulting Group, September 26, 2001

48No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/25/align-your-organization-with-your-customers/Align+Your+Organization+with+Your+Customers2007-04-25+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

Leif Edvinsson (Corporate Director of Intellectual Capital at the Swedish corporation Skandia and co-author of Intellectual Capital: Realizing Your Company’s True Value by Finding its Hidden Brainpower) suggests that companies can evaluate how well they are doing — i.e., assess their customer capital — in part by measuring the following:

• Customer Profile: Who are our customers, and how do they different from our competitors’ customers? What potential do we have to improve loyalty, generate new customers, and convert competitors’ customers?
• Customer Duration: How often does our customer base turn over? What is known about how and when customers become loyal? What is the frequency of our contact with customers?
• Customer Role: How do we involve customers in product design, production, delivery or service?
• Customer Support: What programs are in place to ensure customer satisfaction?
• Customer Success: How do our customers’ annual purchase rate, overall satisfaction and annual purchase amounts measure up with those of our competitors’ customers?

Source:
Intellectual Capital: Tomorrow’s Asset, Today’s Challenge
by Barry Brinker, CPA
AICPA

47No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/24/assessing-customer-capital/Assessing+Customer+Capital2007-04-24+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

• First time visitors to our store tell us……..
• One of the most unusual questions we’ve ever had was………
• One thing people tell us they are confused about our business is……..
• I was especially proud when I helped a customer with……..
• We do lots of things that customers never see, if they knew this they would…….
• The biggest error made by first time buyers is……..
• When we talk with customers they always tell us………(about our business)

Source:
Explorations in Uncovery
GrokDotCom

46No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/23/ask-your-customers-to-complete-these-thoughts-for-you/Ask+your+customers+to+complete+these+thoughts+for+you2007-04-23+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Customer Questions

• Do the company and its leaders have a sense of higher purpose in what they do?

Source:
Making Sense of Executive Pay
by Marcia Blenko
Bain & Company, 1/1/2003

45No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/22/miscellaneous-corporate-governance-questions/Miscellaneous+Corporate+Governance+Questions2007-04-22+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Corporate Governance Questions

• Is your strategy clear?
• Can it be translated into action?
• Is it measurable?
• Does it have the potential to transform your business?
• Do you measure the true drivers of value in your business?
• Do you link your executive compensation to what drives value – key strategic and financial measures as well as relative share price?
• Are your executives motivated to create a dramatic upside for shareholders?
• Is there a downside for mediocre performance?
• Are key front-line employees focused on the same goals and motivated to deliver results?
• Do incentives reinforce a “performance culture”?
• Is your compensation system simple and transparent?
• Does everyone understand how pay is linked to performance?

Source:
Making Sense of Executive Pay
by Marcia Blenko
Bain & Company, 1/1/2003

44No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/21/executive-compensation-diagnostic/Executive+Compensation+Diagnostic2007-04-21+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Corporate Governance Questions

• What products and services do you and your rivals offer, and what are their comparative benefits?
• What companies might launch offerings that are similar to yours?
• How significant are the resources (marketing budget, R&D budget, spin-off, or upgrade plans) your rival plans to deploy?
• How much does it cost you and your competitor to produce comparable products? Does one of you enjoy a cost advantage?
• Where do you and your rival sell products, and to which target audiences?
• How do your sales perform for different customer segments?
• What products does your rival have in the pipeline, and how will they be marketed?
• How is your rival’s company organized? How well are operations performing?
• What are your rivals’ sales channels (store, mail order, web)? What is their sales mix, and will it change?
• Is your rival considering a joint venture or strategic partnership?

Source:
How to Gather Competitive Research
by Jane Hodges
BNET

43No Comments »http://www.mgmtquestions.com/2007/04/19/typical-competitive-intelligence-questions/Typical+Competitive+Intelligence+Questions2007-04-19+18%3A15%3A00Administrator Posted by Administrator / Competition Questions