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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Andrew Tellijohn
June/July 2007

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Customer relations

Michael Paradis
BenNevis Inc.
952.473.9446
mike.paradis@bennevis.com
www.bennevis.com.

To conquer markets,
remove barriers to
customer intimacy

WITH PRODUCT INNOVATION and operational efficiency easily duplicated in today’s global marketplace, customer intimacy has become the remaining differentiating option for building and sustaining a market leadership position.

In order to achieve customer intimacy, the organization must be aligned to consistently deliver high-value customer experiences. While this may sound straightforward, most business leaders will agree that it can be one of the most complex and puzzling business problems to overcome.

No matter what size your company, anticipating and understanding how to meet the challenges of a customer intimacy initiative will give you an advantage.

About those silos
One of the first challenges that must be tackled is overcoming inefficiencies created by internal functional silos. Silos make it difficult to identify areas that need improving.

By their very nature, functional leaders are interested in improving their respective domains, because they are measured and compensated for driving results within their functional area.

This conflict makes it difficult, if not impossible, to prioritize improvement projects, and points to the need for an objective, fact-based way to assess customer-facing capabilities across your organization.

Your next challenge is obtaining the proper insight for making wise business investments, which should be derived from three sources.

First, some of the required information already resides in your organization. Companies typically have substantial amounts of customer data in multiple systems, but haven’t translated it into actionable information.

Identifying where the critical data resides and gathering it into a meaningful management dashboard will provide the insight you need for ongoing intelligent decision-making.

Second, driving your organization with insight obtained only from employees and functional leaders can be dangerous – like trying to drive your car using only your rear-view mirror. Obtaining an objective customer perspective is critical for identifying issues that need to be addressed.

That’s why it’s important to conduct a formal voice-of-the-customer initiative. This will help you understand how satisfied your customers are, what drives their loyalty, and which areas you should address to get the most return on your investment. In addition, it will help you keep a pulse on the competitive landscape and changing market dynamics.

The third and final piece of business insight comes from completing an objective assessment of your company’s customer-facing capabilities that takes nothing for granted. There are many tools available for this type of assessment.

Draw the map
With your intelligence in hand, you can plan your work and effectively allocate resources for incremental improvement projects. A sequence of projects that yield early, incremental success will not only keep your company from trying to do too much, but also encourage the troops to march forward.

It’s crucial to develop what I call a vision and strategy road map. Why? I use as evidence two companies that spent the same amount of money on their customer alignment initiatives.

One company developed a clear plan, focusing on a logical sequence of projects, and gained substantial market share. The other used a shotgun approach, focusing on improving individual functional silos. The second company slid backwards, lost market share to competition, and had to delay their planned initial public offering and other strategic initiatives.

An instrumental part of any plan is developing the metrics for determining if the plan is working. Relying exclusively on quarterly financial results to indicate warning signs is risky. Problems that appear early in the quarter will have gotten a foothold by the time your results are reported, and you could lose market share you gain or the stake you already have.

Use a combination of financial and non-financial indicators specific to the performance improvement project at hand. Non-financial metrics should include regular customer feedback through surveys structured to gain actionable insight, rather than simply a general satisfaction index.

People will make or break your customer intimacy initiative. They need to understand why change is happening as much as they understand what is happening. Communicate the vision to them and empower them to make decisions that support the strategy.

To make them accountable, align their compensation to support the vision for organizational improvement.

Helping your customer-facing team become more efficient and more effective is job number one for improving the customer experience. Our experience has shown that the most productive way to start is by identifying and implementing best practices to help your team accomplish their jobs more efficiently.

Achieving customer intimacy will not happen overnight, but a chief customer officer (CCO) who reports to the CEO or president is an effective catalyst. Fast becoming a fixture in companies aggressively pursuing customer intimacy, a CCO is responsible for executing your customer management strategy.

Functional leaders will recognize the CCO’s authority and look to him or her for guidance. We’ve seen lower level point-people who didn’t have the budget or authority (and probably the experience) fail to rally the troops and get results.

Customer intimacy is all about aligning people, processes and technology to deliver an incomparable customer experience. It’s the key to market leadership and when planned and executed correctly, it’s worth the journey.