The org board. How to develop a company structure - стр. 14

Finding out what holds value for your customers is simple through the use of surveys. A customer survey asks them what is valuable, important and what is missing for them in your product. This survey is not for promotion purposes, but its results are necessary to understand the client’s point of view. When conducting the survey, ask about the product’s shortcomings, because shortcomings and values are two sides of the same coin. If the responses say that they do not like slow service, that means that fast service is valuable. If they say that pricing isn’t clear and that annoys them, then a simple pricing system would be valuable. Think of The Dollar Store or The Dollar Tree – they can be found in any city because their VFP is in demand and have their own clientele.

It is not always easy to objectively look at the results of these surveys. It took me a couple of years to agree with the survey results from our own clients. When I took my first steps in consulting as a business lecturer and owner of a training company, we were conducting great seminars where we taught management tools to business owners and managers. The seminars were attended by thousands of people every year. We had great reviews where they talked about how they wanted to change something in the way their business was organized or how much they liked the ideas we taught them.

But when I analyzed statistical data, it turned out that the average client attended two to four seminars and then stopped attending. Some customers had even booked one or more corporate seminars, but after some time they stopped working with us. Those great reviews they initially gave us after the seminars did not allow us to see the actual situation. Naturally, we waited until we were not doing so well, the number of seminar attendees declined, and it became increasingly more difficult to fill events. Only then did we conduct surveys about the VFP of our company.

It turned out that the clients who wanted to organize the workflow in their businesses and could pay for our services, were not getting what they had expected. We didn’t meet their expectations of implementing management tools. When they came to our seminars, they had hoped to implement the management tools in their organization and, consequently, improve its performance. However, in most cases that wasn't the way it turned out.

We conducted customer surveys regarding the value of our product and it was particularly valuable and important to interview two categories of clients: