George F. Brown, Jr., CEO, Blue Canyon Partners, Inc.
Orignally Appeared:
August 01, 2011
TMC.net
Print This ArticleEven from among firms that are best defined by the products of their R&D departments and laboratories, it is increasingly common to hear an executive state the goal of making his or her company one that is customer-facing. That orientation is laudable. The best companies thoroughly understand their customers and fully incorporate customer insights into their plans and priorities. The challenge is implementing that vision. It’s far easier to profess the desire to be a customer-facing company that it is to actually build such a culture.
Research into the best practices of suppliers serving business markets has generated a fascinating roster of success stories and horror stories told by customers about their suppliers. While the actual stories span the spectrum of topics and circumstances, at both ends of the spectrum, the focus of these case histories clusters around certain themes. There is an important implication of this clustering for executives in terms of the ways in which businesses must evolve their culture to ensure that their company actually delivers on the promise of being customer-facing.
In the case of the many highly-positive success stories are by customers about their suppliers, a significant majority involve innovations brought by the supplier to the customer. The word “innovation,” however, must be interpreted in the broadest possible way, reflecting in a dictionary definition sense “the introduction of something new”. The success stories reflect new products, new services, new business systems, new processes, and just about every other dimension of “new” that a business firm can envision. Sometimes the success story involves solving a problem; other times it involves getting ahead of an opportunity. When customers provide their success stories involving innovation, they describe the contributions with phrases like “they helped us get out in front of [some situation]” and “they enabled us to take our performance to a higher level”.
Unfortunately, customers also have horror stories to tell about their suppliers. They too vary from case to case, but, once again, the majority of horror stories share a common focus. In this instance, the common focus is a failure in implementation, suppliers that in some way failed to deliver on their commitments and promises to their customers. Again, the dimensions of implementation failure are many: late deliveries, short shipments, products that don’t work, calls that weren’t returned, service personnel that didn’t show up, wrong answers provided by technical support teams – the list goes on and on. The customer horror stories involve phrases like “they left us hanging” and (in the horror stories told with the most emotion) “they embarrassed us in front of our own customers”. As the latter statement suggests, many of these horror stories had further repercussions as the implementation failure rippled down the customer chain. Those telling such horror stories had extremely long memories – and very low forgiveness rates.
