3 Factors That Diminish an Organizations Ability to Produce Customer Value

I discussed in a post earlier this week the idea that creating profitable growth in a business is heavily reliant on our ability to bring value to the marketplace. Specifically:

• Additional value for past customers who have stopped buying from us.

• Increased value for our existing customers to sustain their loyalty.

• New value to customers who have yet to invest in our products or services.

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I’ve discussed this idea before, but it seems that the message is still not something many CEOs are able to wrap their hands around. When I’ve asked this question in the past, the responses overwhelmingly point to three factors that diminish an organizations ability to consistently produce customer value:

1. Employees lack of talent to identify new and increased customer value.
2. Lack of resources to support the development and introduction of customer value.
3. A perceived lack of need to invest anytime in the development of new customer value.

It’s #3 that scares me the most as I think this is likely the same philosophy that executives at Blockbuster Video had, just before they closed their doors forever.

Look, it doesn’t have to be complex or costly.

Recently I helped a client develop a simple script of five questions to ask their customers to uncover what the customers valued both today, and what they believed they would value in the future (based on the future direction of their company).

We introduced this script to Customer Service and gave them reasonable targets – ask these questions of five customers each month, then collect the information and populate it into Salesforce, to be later printed in a report and reviewed during monthly marketing and sales meetings.

If you agree that the survival of your business is solely dependent on your ability to consistently offer value, introduce some simple solutions to collect the information and take action on the best ideas that come from the exercise.

If on the other hand you don’t want to invest the time, that’s fine. I’m sure that’s exactly what executives at Kodak thought… just before they closed their doors forever.

© Shawn Casemore 2016. All rights reserved.