Mentor’s Message: Why Focus on Your Customer?
Most managers know that it’s important to focus on their organization’s customers. After all, without customers, a business wouldn’t exist. But there’s a far more specific reason for encouraging everyone in your group to focus on the customer: satisfying customers’ needs translates directly into greater profitability for your enterprise.
How? When you and your team know who your firm’s best customers are and what they want, you can deliver top-notch service to those customers. Your target customers respond by becoming loyal devotees of your company. Loyal customers buy more from the organization and are willing to pay more—enhancing revenues. At the same time, a company doesn’t have to invest so much money in customer acquisition and marketing, so its costs decrease.
Pair increased revenues with decreased costs, and you get . . . profit!
This book helps you activate this cycle of success. You’ll discover why customer loyalty is so important as an engine of profitability, how to target the right customers, how loyalty influences profitability in specific terms, and how to sharpen all employees’ focus on target customers. You’ll also learn valuable techniques for getting to know your best customers and their desires and then using that knowledge to deliver irresistible value to those customers. Throughout the book, you’ll find a wealth of examples, tools, and exercises to help you master the information offered.
Focusing on your customer isn’t just for the folks working in your company’s marketing or sales department or the front-line employees who talk with customers every day. It’s for everyone, no matter what role you play in your organization. This book helps you and your team achieve that focus—and start delivering even better results for your company.
James L. Heskett, Mentor
James L. Heskett has published extensively on customers, service, customer retention, employee capability, and profitability. He is Baker Foundation Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School, where he has taught courses in service management, business policy, marketing, business logistics, and general management since 1965. Heskett is a coauthor of books including The Ownership Quotient, The Service-Profit Chain, and Service Breakthroughs: Changing the Rules of the Game, as well as a CD-ROM for managers titled Service Success. He is a consultant to management and a director of Limited Brands.