Management Questions

• Do you know what your customers really value most about your product?
• Do you know what irritates them about dealing with your organization … or your competitor?
• Do you know what problems they will face in the years ahead? And what future competitive challenges you can help them overcome?

Source:
Partners For Innovation: The Ultimate Competitive Edge
by Katherine Catlin
CEO Exchange

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Take a moment and imagine that you are one of your company’s customers. Fill in your company’s name in the blank and read each statement.

1. [ _________ ] is a name I can always trust.
2. [ _________ ] always delivers on what it promises.
3. [ _________ ] always treats me fairly.
4. If a problem arises, I can always count on [ _________ ] to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution.
5. I feel proud to be a [ _________ ] customer.
6. [ _________ ] always treats me with respect.
7. [ _________ ] is the perfect company for people like me.
8. I can’t imagine a world without [ _________ ].

Source:
Salespeople Who Engage Customers
by Benson Smith
Gallup Management Journal
Note: Excerpted from Discover Your Sales Strengths

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Ask the customer to respond to the following questions with a rating from one (lowest) to 10 (highest):

• Are your calls to us answered promptly?
• Are our customer reps helpful and knowledgeable?
• Are your orders filled correctly?
• Are you informed about new products or product changes?
• Are we easy to do business with?
• Are items you order received in good condition?
• Are items you order received promptly?
• Is our billing accurate?
• Are our credit terms clear?

Source:
All the Right Moves
by Tad Leahy
Business Finance, April 2000

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Customers

• Do you know who your customers are and how many customers you have?
• Do you listen effectively to all your customers?
• Do you regularly make up an inventory of all the needs and expectations of your customers?
• Are complaints replied to within two days and solved within one week?
• Do you make recommendations to customers about the products or devices that best suit their needs?
• Do you know what the costs are when you lose a customer?
• Do you regularly organize meetings with customer groups to learn about their needs, wants, ideas, and complaints?

Leadership

• As a manager, do you know how many complaints are received yearly?
• Is there commitment at top-management for customer orientation?
• Does management set a good example with regard to customer friendly behaviour?
• Is management at all times available to the customer?
• Does customer satisfaction also belong to the evaluation criteria of management?
• Does top management also personally handle complaints of customers?

Policy

• Is customer satisfaction part of your organization’s vision?
• Is the customer satisfaction policy continuously communicated to all employees?
• Do you involve your customers with the execution of improvement processes in your company?
• Do you have an up-to-date databank in which all characteristics of your customers are registered?

Products/services and processes

• Are products delivered within the period expected by the customer?
• Is the phone in your organization answered within three rings in more than 90 per cent of the case?
• Did you appoint process owners for controlling processes?
• Do supporting departments within your organization guarantee quality of the work they deliver?

Human resource management

• Do you have an introduction program in which new employees are also educated concerning the importance of satisfied customers?
• Are customer orientation and continuous work towards improvement criteria for promotion?
• Do you stimulate your employees to generate ideas about increasing customer satisfaction?
• Are the employees’ interest and the interest of the customer related?

Source:
Back to basics: 75 painful questions about your customer satisfaction
by Hubert Rampersad
ManagementFirst.com

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• Have we reduced our Total cycle time by at least 50 percent over the past three years?
• Do 99 percent or more of our orders reach customers on time?
• Are we shipping zero defect products to our customers?
• Have we reduced our product development cycle time by at least 50 percent over the past three years?
• Have we surveyed our customers in the last two years to establish where we rank on customer-defined service factors versus our competitors?
• Have we provided our customers with new value-added services to enhance our products during the last two years?
• Have we clearly defined the measurable goals we want to achieve and when we want to achieve them?
• Are we measuring and improving upon customer-defined service success factors?
• Do our performance measures appropriately balance customer service into the total business equation?
• Is top management actively engaged in improving customer service?

Source:
Customer Service Improvement: It’s Mission Critical to Your Future
by R. Michael Donovan

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• What are your company’s customer service nightmares?
• What customer service move might your competitors make that would be your worst nightmare?
• Are the answers to the two questions above similar? If not, investigate the nature of the differences and address them.

Source:
Out-of-the-Box Customer Service
by Jonathan Byrnes
HBS Working Knowledge, July 7, 2003

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• Have you identified your customers using market research, market segmentation and customer surveys?
• Do you differentiate offers, products and services for different customer groups?
• Have you identified strategic objectives and critical success factors for service and sales to each of these segments?
• Do you regularly collect information on the wishes and needs of individual customers and use this information as the basis of marketing activities?
• When you introduce changes, is it in direct response to identified customer needs? If not, are the changes tested against user needs and preferences?
• Do you have a precise understanding of the cost-benefit ratio for each product or service by market segment and do you use this knowledge as a basis for introducing, changing or discontinuing products or services?
• Have you carried out a thorough analysis of your competitors’ customer services and looked for ways to be more responsive to customer needs?
• Are all staff members trained in customer focus and aware of the central role customer orientation plays in your organization?
• Do you treat your customers as individuals?
• Do you fulfill your promises of quality in products, services and customer communications?

Source:
Customer Orientation: 10 Key Questions for Your Company
by Ana Reyes Pacios Lozano
ManagementFirst.com
Note: Adapted from “A customer orientation checklist: a model” by Ana Reyes Pacios Lozano in Library Review, 14:1 2000

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• Can you describe your firm’s most promising prospects?
• Can you identify the most important problem you solve for them?
• Do they recognize they have this problem?
• Do you know what events trigger a need for your solution?
• Can you rank their top three “buying criteria”?
• Is it easy for prospects to identify your firm as a possible vendor?
• Do they know you can help them?
• Do you know where they turn for information?
• Do you know how they learned about your firm?
• Do they remember you when it comes time to buy?

Source:
Test Your Customer IQ
by Barbara Bix
MarketingProfs.com, May 24, 2005

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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

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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

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