From the course: Business Acumen for Project Managers

Prioritizing the customer for business acumen

From the course: Business Acumen for Project Managers

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Prioritizing the customer for business acumen

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- Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com, said, "We see our customers as invited guests to a party, "and we are the hosts. "It's our job every day "to make every important aspect of the customer experience "a little bit better." Isn't that an incredible way to think about the relationship with your customers? It certainly helped Amazon to become a very successful company. The key to understanding customer service is to understand the balance between what you want to do, what your customers expect from you, in other words, what they value, and how much they're willing to pay for it. Let's start with the design of your product or service. Design and engineering teams are focused on creating new products and services that solve problems for customers. They may use a process such as quality functional design to prioritize features based on what customers want. The customer service team is the group that interacts most often with your customers and that helps to resolve issues when they arise. Ensuring that your products and services are aligned with your customer's expectations can go a long way in improving customer service. In general, the rule is to underpromise and overdeliver. But be careful. Overdelivering too much might be expensive to support. And in that case, you may need to increase your prices. It takes time and costs money to bring customers in the door. This is called the customer acquisition cost. Loyal customers are like free advertising, so it helps to reduce your customer acquisition cost. And referrals are much more likely to become customers than prospects that don't know you. On the other hand, unhappy customers are a big problem. For one thing, it's counterproductive to lose a customer after you've invested sales and marketing efforts to acquire them. But the bigger problem is that unhappy customers tend to share their frustration with other people, and that makes it harder to get new customers. It's usually better to look for compromises that will satisfy the customer without causing harm to your organization. That way, you have a higher chance of keeping their business, of getting future referrals, and of not dealing with the business damage that can be caused by negative reviews. Having a real appreciation for the important challenge of keeping customers happy will enhance your business acumen and make you a key contributor to any project.

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