Customer and Customer Satisfaction Focus

/** I won’t say these are golden rules, as I firmly think nobody can set golden rules except for nature. But then these are the pearls of my painstaking product development and management experience */

As my Product Manager asked me “All this lecture is fine. So what do u want me to do now..?”. He had actually meant “Where do I start..?”.

Product Management is a 360 degree function. It has to encompass the entire business cycle of a product. In general, I visualize 4 phases of business cycle for a product or service.

For products they are 1) Market or Customer Need/Requirements to Product Development 2) Sales Leads to Order 3) Order to Delivery of Product (including customizations if any) 3) Delivery to Repeat Sales.

For (online) services the Sales Leads to Order becomes Bringing customer to Service, Order to Delivery becomes Online Delivery of Service, Delivery to Repeat Sales becomes Repeated Usage of Service.

Many Product development companies (such as ours) use RAD model for deployment, where in products are released in shortest time to market, but then keep on upgrading to reach the desired features. In such a scenario, Product Management at habitat level becomes extremely essential to ensure revenue optimization.

There are four principles in Habitat Level Management that I have understood.
1. Customer Focus (Customer Business Focus, CSAT focus. End User Focus , Requirements Focus)
2. Revenue Focus (Focus on revenues, margins, P&L)
3. Competition Focus (Direct and Indirect competition)
4. Delivery Focus (Budget, Time, Quality)

Once when I was explaining to an aspiring product manager all these functions, the person got zapped up. He was silent for some time and then said “Ok.. what will others be doing in your company, anyway?”

Scrutiny and Judgement
The Product Manager function is like a captain of the team. A product manager needs to LEARN how to use his team for his purpose. If a Product Manager sets about doing everything by himself then he will loose vision of his 360degree function.

But then the team cannot be expected to play well every time. At times the middle order collapses or the tail does not wag the amount it needs to. A product manager needs to develop an independent judgement on various inputs from his team and should be capable of qualifying those inputs through thorough scrutiny.

In fact a Product Managers performance depends a lot on the depth of his scrutiny.

Customer Focus
As I wrote earlier, ideally a Product Manager has to be part of the process that parents the product. If not, atleast he should be completely knowledgeable of the process that parented the product.

My Product = Customer’s Business

The customer focus has to start right from the Customer’s Business. As far as the Product Manager is concerned, the product gets used always in Customer’s Business. The product could be a gaming service and customer may not treat playing games as business. But product manager has to perceive gaming as customer’s business (important for Customer’s survival) and ensure that customer is able to do his business well.

Product Managers should spend some time in understanding how the customer would use the Product and the environment in which customer will use the product.

Position properly: Understand the Customer Organization

In B2B products, understanding the Customer Organization is essential. When I interview Product Managers who I understand are doing Habitat level management, the first question I ask them is about their Customer Organization. Understanding the Customer Organization for their products is the first day responsibility of Product Managers.

Most professional Customer Organizations have diverse departments that would be odds with one another. The Operations group will be focussing on current issues, Technical group will be concentrating on roadmap, SCM group will be on Price and Business group will be on EBITDA.

Though Product positioning is typically done with respect to a market, the product positioning for B2B products has to be diverse and take into account all customer expectations. Very often I have faced situations where CTO of Customer organizations push the product after complete development but the operations/business groups stall it.

The Product has to undergo a thorough and painful revision once again to meet their expectations.

Position Properly: Understand the Customer Segment

In B2C products, understanding the customer segment is essential. The customer segment could be based on age, language, religion, culture, education etc or a matrix of these. Without defining the customer segment, a B2C product cannot be positioned properly.

When products get defined, there is an idea of customer segment for the product typically. But the customer segment either spreads to several other segments or concretizes to a much narrower segment than as earlier defined, during the course of the time product lives in the market.

A product manager has to understand the customer segment and look for change in customer segment that is visible through quantitative and qualitative data.

Customer Satisfaction: Mirage or Image..?

It is very easy to talk about Customer satisfaction in theory. In practice, Delivery and product managers either go bald or grey in chasing Customer Satisfaction. It seems a customer can never be satisfied.
And it is true. Only if he is not satisfied, he is your customer.

Why ?

If customer says he is completely satisfied continuously for sometime, either he is not growing or the information flow with the customer is not proper. In either case, re-evaluate the customer.

So Product Managers need to look for Customer dis-satisfaction rather than Customer Satisfaction. Anyway Customer Support Managers are there to look for Customer Satisfaction.

Customer Expectation depends on price customer pays

This seems a commonsense logic. But when in the heat of business, many product managers do not comprehend this clearly.

Once when we trialed our Software product to our customer(s), the feedback was excellent. After the first quarter, when sales was no-where near expectation, I started drilling down. I found that customers have not exploited our software during the trial period to the extent we would like to. Hence the dis-satisfaction with the product in its final application environment translated into lower sales figure.

That day I learned an important lesson. A customer may not seriously evaluate a trial product. Trial versions can bring out an indicative feedback mechanism of product. But using it as an estimate figure for prospective sales or Customer Satisfaction is not a right approach.

I have time and again seen this in many different products not limited to Software. I have seen it also in online hosted services.

Put Horse before the Cart

I often talk to my Sales colleagues to put the horse before the cart. Horse is the Sales Relationship. A relationship established between the customer’s mind(s) and our product value to customer. Only after the horse is completely ready to drive, we need to add the cart (trials).

Trials (particularly those that cost) need to be brought in only when we determine the customer has enough reason and is keen to do business with our product. A trial can further cement or enable a sales relationship. But for that a relationship should have already been established between customer’s mind and our product.

Sufficient excitement should have been created in customer’s mind by Sales Teams, before trial stage is entered.

At times Sales in their eagerness to widen the Sales funnel push for trials at many places. Trials (at many places) is not a tool to accelerate sales. It is just a sweetener.

Win the Confidence of your Sales Team first

Product Managers need to scrutinize trial requests without emotion and guide the Sales Teams accordingly. Since they are not part of the emotion that a Sales Team is in, they can do this perfectly.

But they should do this without affecting the flow of enthusiasm with Sales. This needs a lot of team working capabilities with a Product Manager. Very Often Product Managers will be seen as hurdles by Sales Teams, if they do not really work with the Sales Teams. For this they need to take part in the Sleepless agony that their sales team is going through in reaching their targets. The Sales Teams need to perceive that the Product Managers are with them.

A Product Manager needs to get the confidence of his sales teams that he is helping them to increase Sales and not trying to add hurdles in their path. Hence they need to enable the Sales Teams to decide themselves and should have their confidence such that they are willing to take the help of Product Manager to get their decisions checked.

Operation Success; Patient Dead

Many a times, Product Managers rely on quantitative data fetched from Sales or Customer Support to determine how the Customers use the Product and the level of Satisfaction with the product. Qualitative data is hard to get and also inconsistent at times.

So Product managers go with the perception created by the Quantitative Data. But that is not true always.

I used to get MIS from Customer Support which says our customer’s network is up 100% of time and end-users have fault-free operation 99.99% of time. But the Repeat Sales would be going down with that customer. What is the use of claiming operation a success, when patient is dying..?

What could be the issues..? This and more in my next post
-Balajee Rajaram