Two contradictory schools of thought exist within management practices for knowing the customer and being in tune with the “voice of the customer.” And both exist whether the customer is someone working in a department (IT, HR, for example) that helps the organization execute its mission or is someone who directly addresses the needs of citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first school, with its traditional teachings, espouses delivering products or services to customers based on what they say they need. Doing this, the teachings say, will increase customer satisfaction and lead to greater organizational efficiencies (such as lower costs).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other school, stressed by entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban and the late Steve Jobs, believes the organization learns little of value by asking customers what they need. As Cuban says, “your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don’t rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That’s your job.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alternatively, as Steve <\/span>Jobs famously put it, “It\u2019s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don\u2019t know what they want until you show it to them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does the correct approach to serving customers lie somewhere in the middle between what customers say they need and what the organization believes they want?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not quite. It’s worse. Between these two approaches is a customer “doom loop,” a vicious cycle of asking customers what they need and customers having difficulty articulating what they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the day, if the organization attempts to take one approach without also doing the other, it gets caught in this customer doom loop. And the more it operates in the middle, the more its actions precipitate the loop’s continuation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to focus continually on understanding not customers’ needs and wants but their desired results. These desired results are often best obtained by observing the customers in their environment to provide a fresh perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stuck in the middle<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The traditional voice-of-the-customer approach dictates capturing \u2014 through observation, interviews, focus groups, and surveys \u2014 customer needs to identify their wants. While this technique can work, it is even more difficult to accomplish in the federal environment because the “customer mindset” is often missing there. Federal workers often do not think of those who enable the mission (IT, HR, and other back-office personnel) as being their customers. Similarly, they often fail to see taxpayers as truly being their customers. As a result, organizations frequently provide a product or service without really understanding their “customers.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n When organizations (whether in the commercial or federal sector) do have a customer-focused mindset and engage the customer, they often learn, as Cuban notes, that customers either do not know what they want or they cannot describe it. Furthermore, many organizations that try to manage (gather, analyze, prioritize, and translate) customer needs, often discover that their different departments understand customer needs differently and customer requirements change quickly over time and organizations have no way to continually adjust to the changes<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unfortunately, the result of the customers’ inability to describe what they want and the organization’s difficulty in managing customer needs is a costly mismatch between what the customer wants and what the organization delivers. Likewise, when organizations deliver products and services \u2014 without asking customers what they want \u2014 they often miss the mark entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Walk a mile in their shoes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To stop this customer doom loop, an organization must learn to “walk a mile in the customers\u2019 shoes.”.<\/span> The organization must visit with customers, ask questions, and observe how they use the product or service to enable the mission. The organization can thus pinpoint unmet customer needs \u2014 the gaps awaiting closure in achieving the desired results of the customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A job needing to be done underlies every product or service solution requested by a customer. Focusing on this job by spending time with the customers enables the organization to deliver a value-added solution that addresses the customer’s desired results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Howard Steinman is a partner with global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney and a leader in the firm’s public-sector practice for the Americas region.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to focus continually on understanding customers\u2019 desired results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":38010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":15,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[15,26],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1932],"class_list":["post-13011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-management","category-opinions"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"7MV4O6VRNRBH5LI2WR3P6FJ5YE","arc_canonical_url":"\/management\/2016\/04\/19\/how-to-prevent-the-customer-doom-loop-in-management\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n