Free Advice - Customer Focus

It should be obvious

Plumber

  • Low cost emergency call-out, usually covered by your household insurance
  • All work guaranteed
  • Bathroom and kitchen fitting
  • Fast washing machine and dishwasher fitting, old units disposed of

Plumber

  • 13mm, 16 gauge copper pipe
  • Soldered joints using flux and high lead content solder
  • All sink fixtures tightened to 3Nm

This may look ridiculous and in truth it was chosen for that reason. No tradesman would produce the list on the right. Yet there are many companies who do their own versions of just that.

We tend to get passionate about what we do, especially in small business where the business revolves around a few people who are good at what they do.

Look at a computer advert and you will see a mess of specifications that mean nothing to most people, there are more TLAs, three letter acronyms, than in almost any other industry and people are just expected to know what they mean. People with no technical background are supposed to know that 3Ghz is a lot faster than 300Mhz.

Somewhere in there we lost the plot. Obviously your company is an exception, you write for the customer. you make the effort to understand what makes the customer buy a product, what needs they have that the product can solve.

If you have been in business for a while and have a group of existing customers then you have an advantage; you can contact some of those customers and ask them a few questions, like:

It's your business so you can make a better and more specific list than this. You will probably have to drill down into some of the answers the customers give so you can find out what needs they had that led them to your company and your product.