Customer
From Best Practices
Introduction
The first purpose of a company or an organization is to meet the needs and the expectations of his customers and to give them satisfaction.
It supposes to concentrate on the customer who becomes the reason for being of the organization.
In a company or an organization, a customer is the one who receives products or services. There are two sorts of customers: the external customers i.e. those who buy products and services of a company; and the internal customers i.e. those who receive products and services from another department in a company.
Without customer, the company cannot give dividend to the shareholders, cannot pay her staff and her suppliers. And so that the organization can perform its obligations and insure its growth, she has to consider the customers as her first priority. She has to bring many attentions to the reactions of them. She has to make sure that they are satisfied by products and supplied services.
And the best way so that the customers are satisfied, it is to understand indeed their needs and their expectations, to be in the listening of what what they look for most, to identify what is important for them, to analyze their customs of purchase (how the customer acquaints with the product, how and where he buys it, how he uses it). It is important also to consider the customers as partners, to consult them at the need and to involve them in the improvement of products, services and processes of the organization.
Good practices
- Classify needs and expectations of the customers in three categories:
- The value of using products by the customers.
- The critical customers contacts the with the company.
- The quality of the relations between the company and the customers.
- Analyse the customers complaints.
- Contact the lost customers.
- Encourage ideas, comments and suggestions of the customers.
- Identify and analyze the external events which have consequences on the behavior of the customers.
- Analyse the purchase customs of the customers.
- Analyze different sources of information (TV, magazines, Internet).
- Analyze the new customs characteristics of the customers.
- Analyze the cultural characteristics, the lifestyles, the languages of regions and countries of the customers.
- Maintain narrow relations with the customers to have a continue feedback of their needs and expectations.
- Adopt an intimate approach with the customers who wish it and who have a long history with the company.
- Consider the customers as partners.
- Analyze the customers channel of consumption of the from the beginning to the end (how the customer acquaints with the product, how and where he buys it, how he uses it).
- Develop a program after the marketing activities to keep the relation with the customer.
- Create a community around the company, around its products and around its services.
- Exploit the information pulled from the information systems of the company to know the expectations of the customers.
