Keeping in Close Contact With Your Customers

Not long ago, I was redesigning a marketing brochure. The designer I chose to work with was very skilled and knowledgeable, had even won awards for graphic projects. He created a wonderful design with a lovely color scheme. There was only one problem.

When I showed the draft to my clients, those people the brochure was designed to interest and entice, it failed rather spectacularly, to serve the purpose for which it was created. The initial design of my brochure actually interfered with getting the key information across to the reader. The color scheme unintentionally obscured the message I wanted to relay.

Surprisingly, expertise can get in the way of effectiveness and the attainment of the objective. During the redesign process he would often say, “In keeping with design principles….” However, what matters in the end is whether new clients will; first open the brochure; second read the contents and; third ideally save it for future reference or even better pick up the phone and call. Ultimately their input overrode design principles and in some cases my personal preferences.

Lydia Messerhammer, an HR professional with a large consumer products company had a similar experience. She was writing a question and answer page as part of an employee orientation package. Her team sought input from another department and believed that they had a clear message. After printing and distributing the brochure, they received calls indicating that the written information to the uninitiated new hire was still unclear.

This experience reminded me yet again of how critical it is to make sure you get feedback from your customers, clients or end users. The higher you are in the organization the more critical it becomes to make time for direct customer/client contact. Your clients’ direct words, not the words filtered through three layers of managers, will tell you everything you need to know. So much is lost in the filtering process.

A supervisor in a large manufacturing firm explains. The company holding the maintenance contract for the copy machines had such poorly trained service techs and bad response time, that they canceled the contract for one year. Unfortunately their direct competitor was even worse. So they were forced to return to the original company.

When a customer service rep called to follow-up on a written satisfaction survey, what happened? The supervisor explained the problems and the history of poor service. The representative tried to fit the comments into the survey but there were no handy checkboxes to reflect his experiences with the company.

You can imagine that the service manager reading a summary report of the survey results would gain a very different impression of his departments performance than had heard directly from his real live customers.

Asking customers directly what they feel or like about something is useful but sometimes they don’t know why they make the decisions they do. William B. Helmreich reported in Marketing News, that a Chinese Ginseng company wondered why its American consumers consistently ranked their product as best but bought a competing brand.

The field researchers found out that the Korean ginseng competitors used a red label. Red, the researchers concluded, is associated with a Chinese symbol. Buyers thought they were purchasing the Chinese product. Think about ways you and your employees can conduct field research to gage true customer satisfaction.

One excellent strategy is to watch customers using a product. For example, radios commonly called boom boxes were initially offered in a whole range of colors. During focus groups, teenagers indicated that color choices would be great. As they were leaving the focus groups as a reward for participation boom boxes were available to take home.

Almost universally the kids chose black boom radios, not the ones in colors, even though they said they would like them. That is why you find in the marketplace almost exclusively black boom boxes.

It is so easy to become engrossed in what we do on a daily basis that we distance ourselves from the customer. We become blind to our own product or service. The best information in the world comes from the people who use your product. Stay close to them. Hear from them directly as Lee Iacocca did with the convertible. He drove a prototype and watched people react. That was all he needed.