Top 5 “Customer Wants” when an Issue Emerges
Developing excellent customer influencing skills across your staff has an effect similar to having more people working on your team! It significantly impacts your ability to win new business, to keep existing customers happy, and to reduce non-value added work.
Strengthening this critical competency results in happier customers with increased confidence in your people and products, less stressful customer interactions, smoother execution with less second-guessing, and fewer “damage control” activities.
Every customer has “built-in” expectations for your team’s response to an issue. Meeting those expectations starts with understanding what they are:
1) Leader: A clearly identified leader / single point contact
2) Team: An empowered team to address the concern
3) Structure: A structured problem solving process
4) Content: Your rigorous work is the heart of any customer issue response.
5) Updates: No news is BAD news – keep your customer updated; show plans and incremental progress regularly. Demonstrate mastery of the situation, scope, time management, and responsibility for outcomes.
Two of CAEDENCE’s core specialties are Problem Solving and Customer Influencing. If you’re facing a daunting customer situation, get in touch: info@caedenceconsulting.com
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
