3 tips to probe what Singapore customers really want

A frequent mistake made by many Singapore organizations has been to focus continuous improvement effort on what managers or employees assume is important to customers. The common tendency is to believe that because our managers and sales are in frequent contact with our customers, we ought to know what they want.

In our work with client organizations and in our surveys, we have found that the overlap between the managers’ list and that of their customers can be nominal, although not totally unexpected.

We asked managers to list down the top 10 needs of their customers and correlate it with inputs from their customers. Now imagine just how much investment and resources would have been wasted pursuing improvements that don’t really matter much to their customers.

Customer Needs Assessment

First and foremost, customer needs identification is important. But it cannot be easily assessed by written surveys. Most have difficulty articulating their own specific needs let alone try to put them down in writing.

A trained interviewer can help customers clearly define what specific needs are to be met by your service or product. This is usually conducted employing focus groups or interviews, observation, or predictive measures of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction data.

Customer Focus and Satisfaction Measures

Customer focus and satisfaction measures, on the other hand, assess whether your service or quality meets their expectations. It includes both soft and hard measures. What people say and what they do may be different.

Soft measures help you understand what customers think of your service or product relative to your competition. They include surveys, focus groups or interviews, and observation.

Hard measures keep you informed about what they are actually buying. They include customer retention levels, number of referrals, market share and revenue.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Surveys can provide important information in the perception of your quality or service yet they are one of the most abused quality tools especially for service companies where the relationship with the customer is vital.

Many organizations simply draw up a superficial list of written questions and then dispatch it to a sampling of their customers. The answers are usually from too small a sample size and the questions frequently do not represent what is important to their customers.

These organizations would then base their entire quality strategies on a return rate under 25 percent of questionnaires sent out.

Remember that your organization cannot afford not to measure customer satisfaction. For without it, your organization really has no basis of knowing how well it is doing, and hence, cannot make meaningful improvements.

Ensure that your organization does it well since these data drive the entire business process. Having flawed data can lead your organization into irrelevant efforts and it can look very busy while going out of business.