Determining Customer Requirements

Introduction:

It's not easy to collect, analyze, and act on customer satisfaction informa­tion on an ongoing basis. However, since the market and business change so fast, you could be out of business before you realize that customer sat­isfaction has göne in the ditch.

Sources of customer information by Xerox:

• Telephone surveys, using a sample of customers who contacted Xerox during the previous month.
• Monthly customer surveys, to gauge level of satisfaction.
• Competitive benchmark surveys of the marketplace.
• Regular focus groups in which Xerox is not identified as the sponsor.
• Ongoing customer panels with which the company shares ideas and from which it gathers input.
• Roundtables with salespeople, to determine problems and solutions
• Market research focused on potential product opportunities.
• Collaborative development with customers, in which Xerox installs prototypes at a few customer locations to see how the prototypes meet their needs.
• Competitive product analysis.
• Discussions with industry experts.
• Conjoint analysis, with customers, of specific product and service features.
• Collaboration with cosuppliers (such as computer hardware and soft-ware developers).

Staples:

Staples uses its database of customer information to build evaluation techniques that help it identify sites for new superstores. One of the great advantages of pulîing everything into a database is that it offers the ability to manipulate the information, to use it as IBM Rochester, Xerox, and Staples do: grouping their customers into majör markets, then extracting the precise customer requirements for each. However, the database is not a prerequisite for collecting, organizing, and using information to understand your customers. You may choose to have these functions performed by teams in the senior staff, marketing depart-ment, or customer service department.

Method of Sampling:

• Purchase patterns are reported monthly from response rates to cata-log and merchandise offerings.
• Customer service measures are systematically reported. Problem or-ders and presidential complaints are tracked daily and reported weekly through the company's cali center data collection. in addition, mystery shops are conducted and reported monthly.
• Comprehensive customer behavior analysis is performed and shared with top management quarterly. The analysis includes database pat­terns such as new customer additions, retention, and sales per average account. it also covers merchandise sales patterns, customer feed-back, and operational performance.

Know your customers. Know your business. Know yourseîf. The degree of knowledge in ali three of these areas will shape your success.