Customer Needs
Since the dawn of time alchemists have searched for the philosopher’s stone. That stone, like the goose with the golden egg, remains frustratingly elusive.
Similarly, in the modern world, juju men, with earnest expressions and a limitless array of PowerPoint presentations, continue to search for magic formulae responding to what their customers need.
In the TV world the solution of choice is to let the ratings expose a show that people like and then to mercilessly thrash its format to death. Make no mistake, I personally enjoy Strictly, but the Teletubbies who design programming are mistaken if they conclude that I will therefore also like “Strictly Come Weather Forecast” or “Fake Tan”: A cop show about the darker criminal face of the dance world.
In the retail world, eight out of ten people might express a preference for the old-fashioned high street butcher, with sawdust on the floor and a cheery, whistling straw-hatted proprietor who’s sausages are beloved in three counties. But when Freshco or Fosbury’s constructs a film set butcher’s shop in a corner of its food mart and staffs it with adenoidal spotty neanderthals, no amount of stage dressing will conceal the fact that the result is a fabrication.
Surely the answer is simple – if deeply unpalatable to so many of our respected corporate leaders.
Number one: Listen to what customers say that they want.
Number two: Frankly and honestly eliminate the undeliverable.
Number three: Where conflicting, mutually exclusive, customer needs are expressed, seek to offer alternatives.
It seems to me that the step most often ignored is the second: The modern inclination being to spin one’s way around unpalatable truths rather than to confront them. When the customer says “I want it in an unlimited range of colours and sizes and I want it yesterday and I want it to make a small carbon footprint and I want it to be manufactured humanely and I want it free” the typical corporate gerbil recoils in horror from the fact that what the customer wants and what he can deliver are two different things.
At Schools Plus venues we aim to assist any way we can with our customers needs as it is usually beneficial to us both! It’s amazing how a little thing can just make a customers day that little bit easier. We urge our customers to speak to the venue staff to offer up any changes or niggles they have as we can often fix them. Unlike Mr. Corporate Britain who often seems to hear want ‘he’ wants to hear, not what the public are saying!
So please Mister Corporate Britain, tell me frankly that you can do A, and can do B but not C simultaneously and that the cost is D. I won’t think any the less of you for being honest – rather the reverse.
