Who’s your customer?
Who’s your customer?
by Damian Heffernan
“If you know who your customer is then you can find out what they need, and what they think about the value you’re providing to them”
Sounds like a straightforward question and an easy one to answer but is it actually?
So many businesses and the people within them believe they’re delivering the right service and value but are they doing it with an ever so slightly wrong understanding of the actual customer?
I see this quite often in IT service provider teams and given the prevalence now of middleware and integration services and the teams that build them, sometimes it’s not clear who your actual customer is.
Is it the end user of the service?
Is it the backend team, the other division within your business?
The Contact Centre?
The Database team?
The list of customer segments within a contemporary complex business can feel almost endless. Unless you are in a very simple business with one simple product offering and a very limited value stream there’s going to be many customers and many customer segments as well.
What can be done?
The Business model canvas approach used by MBA students world-wide, gives an easy intro to the idea of Customer Segments - It states: Various sets of customers can be segmented based on their different needs and attributes to ensure appropriate implementation of corporate strategy to meet the characteristics of selected groups of clients. In other words, different customer segments will need different services, different product offerings and generate different kinds of value.
I don’t run the business, why do I care?
But you do perform the work. Your team does work and delivers value. What value should you be trying to deliver? The exercise of defining your customer can help at every level or your organisation. If you know who your customer is then you can find out what they need and what they think about the value you’re providing to them. Are you under or over performing for them? Are you adding value to their value?
How can you find out?
Start with a workshop
A simple workshop can give you real insight into what you do and who you do it for. The power of doing this work doesn’t come from sitting in a room and doing it by yourself: it comes from collaboration and the conversations that happen when you do it as a group. So involve the whole team in this activity.
Don’t overcook it
Some simple questions can be powerful to prompt thinking:
What do we Do? What Value do we deliver? And Who do we deliver this value for?
Crowd source the answers
Get the group to start jotting down where they think the demand for your service comes from. Then talk about it. The whole team will benefit from the conversation and lightbulb moments might start happening as people see the different ideas about who is asking for your services and indeed who is benefitting from them.
Group / Sort / Filter
Group and capture topics and themes. Using voting to prioritise and understand what your team is thinking.
Gather Insights
From there you will start to reveal - Who is our biggest customer group? Who is most valuable to us? Who is currently underserved by us?
You should start to get an idea of who your customer is, or who your team thinks their customer is. Devoting some workshop time is a highly valuable alignment activity you can provide for your team to help them know who your customers are. And once you get that right you can get on with the easy part: delivering real value to them.
***
Damian is a SENIOR AGILE COACH and CONSULTANT, TECHNOLOGY LEADER & PRODUCT MANAGEMENT SPECIALIST at ReBoot Co.
Looking to Take Your Teams to The Next Level?
Book a preliminary chat or even a coaching session with ReBoot Co. co-founder Alex Stokes to learn how we can help with your transformation needs. There are 30 minute slots for a chat, or 60 minute slots for a coaching session.