‘Too much intelligence and energy,’ Warren Buffett once wrote, ‘is being devoted to scraping the crumbs off the table of capitalism instead of preparing the meal.’

Seth Godin has posted this recent article over at his blog and we could not resist sharing this simple graphic which is one way companies can look at the impact of their customer value proposition:

Too many customer value propositions fall in the ‘ignored’ or ‘bored’ category.

So many offerings are commodified. Companies, obsessed with the urge to ‘beat numbers’ or ‘beat the competition’, develop a scarcity mentality when it comes to customer value and lapse into incrementalism.

The result are bland, meaningless ‘solutions’ that fail to connect with customers emotionally.

Talent Technologies recognises the importance of working Outside In, starting with your customer experience and value proposition and then working backwards into the organisation to ensure that your people – a company’s most valuable resource – can deliver on them.

Creating Customer Delight demands great soft skills!

One of the reasons companies lapse into incrementalism and low customer value add is because customer delight is an end state that is difficult to do.

Companies spend plenty of time defining – and trying to define – what they want their people to do – yet rarely even discuss how they want their customers to feel.

And customers, as we know, buy emotionally.

Many companies we know also find it difficult to perform a combination of states including innovation, design, consistency and quality among others, often because of poor teamwork, high turnover, low motivation, poor communication and collaboration, and political short-termism.

To achieve customer delight, as the above graphic shows, needs a combination of factors which demands that companies overcome these shortcomings.

That’s why top-performing companies like Apple, which successfully integrates innovation, collaboration, quality and design – do so not through creating regulations and processes but through having worked hard to achieve the human factors of teamwork, collaboration, communication and trust.

In the words of Steve Jobs ‘we’re run like the world’s biggest start-up’. Yet this start-up more effectively delivers on customer delight than almost all its competitors who, in many cases, have failed on the ‘soft’ side of their businesses.

Specifically, their organisational design is simply not fluid enough to be able to unite all the ‘hard’ components that add value in Godin’s graphic and deliver them in quantity.

What you can do now

Talent Technologies is unique in being able to identify your customer’s current experience and value proposition, and articulate that in a way for management to create a strategy which they can easily deliver.

We have developed a simple pathway that enables companies to work Outside-In and deliver Customer Delight with clearly-defined steps.

The process works with companies in any industry, including those which do not deal directly with their end-customer.

Next step: simply check the ‘Customer Experiences’ box in our feedback form here and we will send you more information.

***

Talent Technologies :: Management Training Programmes in Thailand and South-East Asia