Resnick Unplugged

It's the customer, stupid!

"There is only one boss. The customer. And they can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending their money somewhere else." - Sam Walton

Member, patient, beneficiary, insured, recipient, enrollee…call them what you want, at the end of the day they’re all CUSTOMERS.

Whether formulating a marketing plan, reengineering product communications or forecasting advertising budgets you can't do it without customers.

All too often customers get lost in the shuffle. It's easy when internal pressures of product development, regulatory constraints or Wall Street loom large. Successful businesses cannot afford to overlook consumer wants and needs. Understanding customer basics is important; exceeding expectations creates market leaders.

Narrowcasting
Customer focus means taking an organization's products and services to specialized markets. The result is customers that are "narrowcasted" into distinct segments, each with a narrow, highly defined focus.

Its time to move away from business plans built on broad-based, "all things to all people" strategies. In these business models, creating the product takes the spotlight — you can have any color, as long as it’s black!

In a customer centric environment, the customer is viewed as the central asset of company. Products and services are tailored to unique needs of each customer group. This relies on a range of segmentation profiles, always evaluating and refining over time based on demographic, psycho-demographic and customer lifestyle factors.

Gut Check
Winning companies elevate customers within their business.  To accomplish this an effective first step is conducting a customer audit — define your base(s), identify their expectations and value triggers, evaluate the “customer experience" and assess satisfaction indicators. This can significantly enhance your ability to protect market position with existing customers and extend your reach to attract new ones.

Here’s a quick customer gut check guide*:

§    What are the different categories of customers your organization interacts with every day?

§    What are the top three expectations of your customer base? Do your set different expectations for different segments?

§    What do customers go through to do business with your company --- map out the sequence of customer interactions?

§    What are the top three areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction customers experience with your business?

§    What corrective action could you take to improve the way your company deals with customers — what’s the one thing that would allow you to exceed expectations?

§    How could you improve your customer sales experience – prospecting, communication and retention?

* SOURCE: Paul Levesque's "The WOW Factory: Creating a Customer Focus Revolution in Your Business".

Customers are the core of your business. They are the reason for producing products or delivering services. Whether direct-to-consumer or business-to-business, the first step toward exceptional customer management is research, data and intelligence. The payoff is huge. Gathering and interpreting the “right” information allows you to create customer profiles (where find them, how to get their attention, what motivates them to take action) and then establish a customer connection (value points, concerns, the "what’s in it for me”).

The result is a meaningful, loyal relationship from pre-sale to post-sale to after-sale selling. It’s the customer, smartie!

© Lindsay Resnick

Intelligent Implementation

...Be Nimble, Be Quick

At a time when competitive rivalry has never been more intense, managers are worried. They are hearing words such as decision paralysis, over-analysis, death-by-committee and risk adverse used to describe their staff. It’s not sitting well. Add to the mix “…but that’s the way we’ve always done it” and they get the message — the ability to make informed decisions and take timely action will determine success (not to mention job security). 

Profitable topline growth defines success. Competition defines markets.

Look at the competitive fray shaping today’s healthcare sector. Regional health plans are doing battle with deep-pocket national mega-plans. Health insurance companies own banks and banks have healthcare business units. The pharmaceutical industry is forever juggling brand and generic pricing while using PBMs to manage formularies. And for the last few years they’ve been looking over their shoulder at Canadian drug reimportation.

On the provider side, community hospitals are going head-to-head with academic medical centers that are spending big bucks on expansion – locally, nationally and internationally. On top of that, there’s a growing buzz about medical tourism. Physicians are moving to pay-as-you-go business models letting patients deal directly with insurance companies. Others are embracing concierge medicine, requiring annual patient membership fees. At the same time, retail clinics in chain department stores, groceries and pharmacies are stealing routine office visits from local doctors.

It’s tough out there!

Going head-to-head in today’s markets means having intelligence to understand your customer, an ability to turn intelligence into implementation, and swift execution of an action plan.

Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is an integral part of any organization. Gathering, analyzing and communicating intelligence is a systematic process. It allows you to see a total business environment and group data (qualitative or quantitative) to reveal the “big picture”. The result increases your probability of making a sound decision.

Intelligence cuts across stakeholders and strategic drivers that influence every level of your business. There are three distinct phases of intelligence:

1. Data is raw material. Its numbers or facts presented in a vacuum. It’s discrete, scattered, and has no larger meaning.
2. Information is data in context. It’s the result of analysis that suggests action, strategy or decision-making.
3. Intelligence is actionable. It’s grouping data to reveal a larger view of the marketplace so it has more meaning.

A learning organization is able to put intelligence to work.  For example, using intelligence to understand your customer base helps shape product differentiators, messaging and buyer/non-buyer sales predictions. Competitive intelligence is also important. This creates a "snapshot" of your competition by defining key characteristics about their business. It dissects an adversary’s leadership, operations, market position and financial structure. Understanding your competition reveals how they make decisions, implement strategies and ultimately, position themselves against you in the market. 

Having complete intelligence to support internal decision‑making sets the stage for a business to take action.

Implementation
Turning intelligence into action is the most critical and most difficult stage of executing a business or marketing plan. Avoiding problems that get in the way of implementation can go a long way toward guaranteeing success. A study of private sector CEOs identified these top five implementation pitfalls:

1. Time commitments and resources were underestimated
2. Competing activities and crises distracted attention
3. Training and instruction for lower level employees were not adequate
4. Key tasks and activities were not defined in enough detail
5. Information systems used to implement and monitor were inadequate

Implementation starts with intelligence and is embodied in a well-defined, well-communicated plan of action — great implementation of a poorly conceived strategy doesn't get you anywhere. Successful implementation means dedicating sufficient resources (money, time, technical, human), and planning sequenced action steps built around specific responsibilities and measures (who does what, when and where).

In competitive markets simply surviving requires a basic ability to evaluate customer needs and wants, adapt best practices, understand vulnerabilities and learn from your competitors.  Moving from survival to success means a capacity to take action — be nimble, be quick…be successful.

© Lindsay Resnick