The Customer is Never Right

“Uncle PM, I’m always being asked by our sales team to change our products to do exactly what our customers want. I keep resisting because the time spent making these changes takes away from delivering the innovative ideas we ourselves want to implement. How do you deal with this?”

I could see a bit of a smile developing.  This was probably one of his sore spots at work as well.  “Nephew, my customers are never right!” gasp, sacrilege, that’s not what McDonalds’s says! – “Although I always treat them as though they are.  It’s good for relations and it encourages them to come back and buy again from me.”  I had to ask the obvious question.  “How do you influence them without insulting them or loosing their confidence?”

“One of the cornerstones of my success has been the way I work with my customers”, he stated.  “There are several common sense principals about customer management to keep in mind”:

• My customers look to me as a subject-matter expert.  They expect me to always know a bit more than they do about the business. They come into my warehouse looking for ideas to enhance their own success; only occasionally do I find that they give me ideas I have not already developed. 
  
  When I’m a buyer, I loose confidence in a supplier if I know more about what I am looking for then they do. My tendency is to put them aside and look for a more experienced individual to deal with – as a Product Manager; I never want that to happen to me.

• My customers are the best test vehicles. I regularly take my core customers to a special “idea” shelf. This is where I maintain a showcase of new and innovative ways to present and prepare fruit products. My main goal is to test innovation and demonstrate thought leadership, but mostly my goal is to obtain a thoughtful reaction. 
  
  If negative, I lower the priority of a new idea. If positive, I often move to the steps of a “new idea” process and start to explore how it can become part of my mainstream business.  As a subject-matter expert, I view it as my responsibility to innovate and the only way this can happen is to know the business of my customers and involve them in realizing innovation.

• My customers want to know I care about them. This is where technology comes into play. If I miss a customer call, I make sure I call back right away. If I go away on vacation, I make sure someone follows up with a message giving the customer the option of waiting for me to return or speaking to someone else. I keep track of important details about each customer and use that information to determine how and when I interact with them.
  
  When specials come in, I always have a list of customers who have previously indicated interest in whatever the product might be. All of this is purely a discipline issue and is wholly dependant on keeping yourself organized. “Your in high tech”, he said to me, “keeping yourself organized should be easy”. If only he new the reality of living in the high tech world.

• Don’t move faster than your customers can move. I store and gather up my ideas for when I need them. My goal is to have the customer buy something from me today, and want to come back for more tomorrow. Once my goal is achieved, I don’t need to spend more time selling new ideas. I can save new ideas for when I sense key customer relationships need a boost. It’s like a running race, to win the 100-metre dash you only need to be 1/100th of a second faster than everyone else, being even faster doesn’t get you any additional prizes.

I found myself thinking of a time when we let our product cycle be dominated by requirements related almost exclusively to existing customers. When we announced the release, we had little industry coverage as the majority of changes were subtle and only appreciated by knowledgable product users. There was nothing to attract new customers or apply the solution to adjacent market opportunities. It took us 6 months to produce the next release with something new for our team to sell.

The customer is clearly right, it is there perspective and it should be valued. To grow a business properly, you need to balance how much focus you place on satisfying the needs of existing customers versus those of the broader market. It's not an easy balance to make given how vocal customers can be. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of addressing customers ahead of the market, especially when their voices are so easily heard and become almost the default evidence to support a product change. Evidence related to addressing market needs often come more from intuition and thought leadership which is less factual or scientific -- hard arguments to win in a product planning activity.