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Issue #22: December 31, 2002
To our readers:
The threshold of a new year is a perfect time to resolve to do something better,
to accomplish a fresh goal, to improve your business and career. And while it is true that
many of us make and break New Year's resolutions at a rate that makes it seem pointless to
enter the resolution-making fray -- 36% of us break our New Year's resolutions by the end of
January, according to Journal of Clinical Psychology -- it is also true that there is value
in committing to a better, more productive behavior at the dawn of a new year. Therefore we
encourage you to resolve to improve one behavior that would make a positive impact on your
business and career. Keeping it simple can mean making it successful.
Here's one resolution to consider: make yourself, your business, your product, more useful
than ever to your customers by intensifying your ability to hear what they want.
Knowing what your customers want gives you the opportunity to deliver it. Whether
your "customers" are buyers of your company's product, fellow staff members with whom
you work, your employees, or your boss, learn to hear them better than before. Know what
they truly, deeply want so you have a better chance of providing it and making yourself more
successful in the process.
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Two Tips for Learning What Your Customers Really Want:
1. Remember that few people want exactly what you want, even in identical circumstances.
Remembering this enables you to let go of assumptions that will get you into trouble.
You might assume, for example, that because you thrive on peace and quiet your employees
do too. In an effort to provide them what you think they want, you could spend irreplaceable
time and money on sound-proofing their work spaces and providing them as much privacy as
possible. What if they grew up doing homework and other projects with a background of
grinding music or in large and noisy groups? They might hate silence and being alone!
In that case, all your efforts to provide peace and quiet not only don't make these employees
happy, they make you look foolish to your employees for not realizing who they really are.
The same applies to customers from outside your company. You think a customer wants a
telephone system that offers 15 different features because that's what you would want in
her situation. The customer wants absolute simplicity, a telephone system with the fewest
features possible that will meet her company's needs. If only you had known that . . .
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2. Replace your assumptions with questions designed to find out what people really
do want.
Once you have given up making assumptions about what people want you are free to
ask the questions that will enable them to tell you what they want. Since they often don't
know themselves, your questions are doubly important. Your customer might even think she wants
those 15 features until she gets the telephone system installed and finds out how confusing it
is to her staff. Then she realizes she hates all those features, and can't help blaming you to
some degree for her being stuck with a costly system that annoys her, and her entire staff, day
after day. So do your homework and create questions that will tell you and your customers what
they want. Sample questions for a customer who wants soft skills training: What would you like
your staff to do more competently? In what area(s) do your employees fall short when working
on a project with a deadline? How does your staff's way of meeting challenges differ from your
picture of the ideal way to handle challenges? What do you wish your employees would do that
they don't do? Where do your employees excel? In what ways do your employees work well
together? Where would your employees say they need help?
When you have decided to find out what those around you really want, you have taken the first
step to providing legendary customer service. And history tells us that those who provide
legendary customer service stand a much better chance of not only succeeding, but thriving,
during even the roughest economic period.
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