A Quote by Barbara Bund

The outside-in discipline requires that you have an explicit customer-based reason for everything you do in the marketplace. Managers need to create what I call "customer pictures," verbal descriptions of customers that highlight the key customer characteristics and make those customers come alive. Although managers never know as much about customers as they want and need to know, the outside-in discipline requires that they construct customer pictures anyway, basing the pictures on whatever hard data they have plus hypotheses and intuition.
The decision-makers should communicate the customer pictures and the logic of the strategies and actions. That communication allows employees throughout the organization to implement the strategies and actions, tweaking them appropriately in response to variations in the marketplace. It also allows employees to recognize information in the marketplace that contradicts the customer pictures, either because the pictures were not entirely correct or because customers have changed.
Often, very talented technical people find it extraordinarily difficult to take the viewpoint of customers, who are often ignorant about the technology and who may have strong and perhaps incorrect prejudices about it. The technical people may believe, deep down, that they know better what customers "should" need. Customers, of course, have a different perspective. They want products that will solve customer problems and provide other customer benefits, and will do so without undue risk or cost. Not infrequently, customers view advanced technology itself as a risk.
The reader is not the customer. The retailer is the customer. So I try to have as much interaction with the retailers as possible because those are my customers.
Quality that significantly exceeds the customer's expectations doesn't seem to pay off. This 'delight the customer' stuff isn't rewarding. One has to be careful about delighting customers too often, because it sort of reshapes customer expectations.
Often people say they can't base their strategies on customers because customers make unreasonable requests and because customers vary too much. Such opinions reveal serious misconceptions. The truly outside-in company definitely does not try to serve all the needs of its customers. Instead, its managers are clear about what their organization can and should do for customers, and whatever they do they do well. They focus.
Lyft is focused on the customer - the driver - as GM is. I've talked many times about our goal being, 'How we can put the customer at the center of what we do so we earn customers for life?' It's a very common goal of putting the customer first.
That's a very critical phase in customer service because you can start to really understand what part of customer service has value to customers and what part is bothering customers.
I have connected by phone with customers who have left negative reviews and had a chance to get to know them. Not only was I able to solve their problems, a lot of the customers were so happy with the customer service that they become repeat customers.
The customer wants what the customer wants - when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. And if you want to build a big business, and you want to be meaningful to a big, broad group of customers, you need to think about how you're going to meet them in the various places where they might expect to see you.
The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.
My view is that everything begins with the customer. If you know the customer, then you can match the merchandise and then you can market it. The marketing is kind of the icing. The foundation is the cake. That's the merchandise. Then the question is, "Do the customers want cake, or do they want cupcakes or donuts. What is it?"
I'm making a case against how money managers are handling customers' money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created.
My aspiration is that M&M become one of the most customer-centric organizations in the world. If we focus on understanding our customers, we will be able to develop customer-centric innovations.
Although I have never worked in a community bank, I have been a customer, and I know from personal experience the special skills that these institutions bring to their customers.
Downey Savings & Loan receives high ratings from its customers in California in areas related to personal service and for being customer focused. Downey customers are also twice as likely to visit a branch as their primary transaction method, which contributes to higher overall satisfaction levels. Multiple convenient locations and extended operating hours in supermarkets positively increase customer perceptions of convenience for Downey.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
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