CHAPTER 2

Know Your Customer

When you hear the word customer, who comes to mind?

If you’re like many people, you associate the word customer with external consumers of your company’s products and services—the people who actually purchase and use your business’s offerings. To create a great customer experience, however, it’s important to define the term customer more broadly.

While the individual (or institution) that actually buys your goods is the ultimate customer, there are often other constituencies involved in the transaction that your company is also serving. These stakeholders represent a type of customer, as well, and so there is an opportunity to engineer a customer experience that impresses them, too.

Let’s consider some examples: If your business sells goods directly to individual consumers, say through your website, then that’s pretty straightforward. The online buyer is your customer.

But what if your product is purchased by consumers from an intermediary, such as a third-party distributor or a retail store? In that scenario, the intermediary is another type of customer—and an important one to serve well, particularly if you’re competing against other businesses for the distributor’s attention or retail shelf space.

If you’re in the B2B arena, and your products or services are purchased by other entities, those businesses certainly qualify as your customers. However, within each of those businesses are many different constituencies that play a role in your success. There’s a decision maker, of course, but there are purchase influencers, too, such as product users, procurement staff, chief financial officers, and so on.

Take medical equipment, for example. A hospital administrator may make the ultimate decision about what brand of equipment to purchase, but the doctors and nurses who actually use the equipment will no doubt have some input. And that input will be based on their personal experience using the equipment, which will, in part, be shaped by how patients feel when the equipment is used on them.

Therefore, there can be many levels of customers involved in the experience value chain. That’s an important thing to recognize, because in certain types of businesses, success comes from not just making your customer happy, but also making their customer happy.

Does Everyone Have a Customer?

There are typically many people in an organization who don’t have direct day-to-day contact with the customers who buy and use the company’s products. Does that mean those employees don’t really have a customer?

Absolutely not! Everyone in an organization has a customer, and often more than one. Sometimes, however, that customer might be internal—a colleague in another department or a teammate just a few steps away. This again underscores the importance of defining the term customer broadly.

An internal customer is any colleague who relies on you to fulfill their job duties. That’s an important idea to take to heart, because behind every great external customer experience lies a great internal customer experience.

For example, in many organizations, information technology (IT) staff provide the systems that call center reps rely on to serve customers. When IT delivers a great experience to the call center (in the form of helpful, user-friendly systems), then the call center is better equipped to deliver a great experience to their external customer.

Marketing staff develop the materials that sales staff rely on to inform and influence their prospects. When marketing delivers a great experience to sales (in the form of engaging and compelling communication pieces), then sales is better equipped to deliver a great experience to those prospects.

Manufacturing staff build equipment that field representatives install at customer sites. When manufacturing delivers a great experience to those field reps (in the form of high-quality, easily assembled equipment that works perfectly out of the box), then the field reps are better equipped to deliver a great experience to their customers.

Human resource staff hire people into the company who then help manage and run the business. When human resources delivers a great experience to the business leaders it serves (in the form of finding and attracting top talent), then the organization gets the skilled and competent workforce it needs to deliver a great experience to its customers.

Perhaps the best way to get all employees to appreciate that they have a customer is by stressing to them one simple, fundamental truth: no matter what title you possess or what position you hold, there are only two roles in any organization—you’re either serving the customer, or you’re serving someone else who does. Period.

By describing every employee’s responsibility in this simple manner, it helps frame the concept of customer-centricity in a way that’s relevant and actionable for the entire workforce. It promotes a culture that rightfully accentuates the value not just of the traditional, external customer experience, but also of the oft neglected but equally important internal customer experience.

How Do I Know Who My Customers Are?

This might sound like a silly question. Isn’t it as simple as following the money? Whoever pays me for my products and services, well, they must be my customer, right?

In the most traditional sense, that’s true. But as noted earlier, there can be many different types of customers in your business’s value chain, some of whom will never be paying you a dime, directly. In addition, there are likely a whole host of employees in your organization who exclusively serve internal customers, an important constituency but one that’s never going to pay their colleagues for the internal support they receive.

Anyone that you serve or support in some fashion, internal or external to your company, can be considered a customer. To help pinpoint those individuals, consider these questions:

   Who uses or benefits from the work you do—whether it’s the equipment you manufacture, the reports you prepare, the inquiries you answer, the research studies you conduct, the systems you support, and so on? The people who benefit from your work are your customers.

   For whom does the output of your work serve as an input? The work you do might not translate into a final product. You might build a component that someone else uses to build a product. You might compile data that someone else uses to complete a report. When you produce something upstream that someone else depends on downstream, then that person is probably your customer.

   Who relies on you (or your work product) to achieve something? This simple question might be the easiest and most straightforward way to identify the people to whom you should be delivering a great customer experience.

Are My Employees My Customers?

Let’s answer this question by using the previously described litmus test. If you’re in a supervisory role, does your staff rely on your assistance to fulfill their job duties?

Absolutely. One of the most critical responsibilities organizational leaders have is to set their teams up for success, to remove obstacles they can’t remove themselves, and to provide those teams with the resources and guidance they need to reach their potential.

Granted, employees are a very different type of customer, one that falls outside of the traditional definition. After all, instead of them paying you, you’re paying them. Yet regardless of the direction the money flows, one thing is clear: employees, just like other types of customers, want to derive value from their relationship with the organization. Not just monetary value, but experiential value, too: skill augmentation, career development, camaraderie, meaningful work, a sense of purpose, and so on.

If a company or an individual leader fails to deliver the requisite value to an employee, then—just like a customer, they’ll defect. They’ll quit, driving up turnover, inflating recruiting/training expenses, undermining product/service quality, and creating a whole lot of unnecessary stress on the organization.

So even though a company pays its employees, it should still provide them with a value-rich employment experience that cultivates loyalty. And that’s why it’s prudent to view both current and prospective employees as a type of customer.

The argument goes beyond employee engagement, though. There’s a whole other reason why organizational leaders have a lot to gain by viewing their staff as a type of customer. That’s because, by doing so, they can personally model the customer-oriented behaviors that they seek to encourage among their workforce. How better to demonstrate what a great customer experience looks like than to deliver it to your own team? After all, how a leader serves their staff influences how the staff serves their customers.

Want your team to be super-responsive to the people they serve? Show them what that looks like by being super-responsive to your team. Want them to communicate clearly with customers? Show them what that looks like by being crystal clear in your own written and verbal communications. There are innumerable ways for organizational leaders to model the customer experience behaviors they seek to promote among their staff. It has to start, however, by viewing those in your charge as a type of customer you’re trying to serve.

Of course, viewing staff as customers doesn’t mean that leaders should cater to every employee whim or that they should consent to do whatever employees want. Leaders sometimes have to make tough decisions for the greater good. In those situations, effectively serving employees means showing respect for their concerns and interests, and thoughtfully explaining the rationale behind what might be an unpopular decision.

The key point is simply this: with every interaction in the workplace, leaders have an opportunity to show their staff what a great customer experience looks like. Whether you’re a C-suite executive or a frontline supervisor, that opportunity must not be squandered.

• • •

Actively managing and differentiating your company’s customer experience requires thinking broadly about all the types of customers you serve. Strive to create a great customer experience for all of those constituencies, because each of them plays an instrumental role in shaping people’s perceptions about you, your business, and your brand.

CHAPTER 2 KEY TAKEAWAYS

•   Effective management of the customer experience requires a broad definition of the term customer. While there may be only one purchase decision maker, one person “writing the check,” there are often many constituencies in a business’s value chain, all of whom need to be served with distinction.

•   Behind every great external customer experience is a great internal customer experience. Some employees may never have regular contact with end consumers of a product/service—but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a customer. Everyone has a customer, even if it’s a colleague just down the hall.

•   Before considering how to engineer a better customer experience, think carefully about who all of your customers are. Anyone who relies on you or your work product to accomplish something or to satisfy a need is probably worth viewing as a customer.

•   Business leaders should view staff members as a type of customer, since a principal responsibility for managers is to facilitate the success of those in their charge. Leaders, by virtue of the perch they inhabit, have a unique opportunity to demonstrate and teach customer-focused behaviors through their own personal interactions with employees.