Best Practice #1: Focus on meeting your Customers' expectations

What do your Customers' expect(ations) from your products and services?
How do you know?

Are you sure?

Some of the more common general techniques/methods used to understand what customers' want/need include interviews, surveys, focus groups, Kano Model Analysis, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), RAD/JAD and documented requirements.Other, less common, techniques include statistical and visualization methods.

While all of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, each will help give a view of what Customers' expect from products, services and support. A best practice technique to find out what Customers' really expect is simply to ask them and listen to what they tell you ... using qualitative information to understand their desires and then using quantitative data to understand how satisfied they are in meeting those expectations.

Beware that some most desired attributes are unspoken and even unexpected by customers. An interesting aspect of these expectations is that it is not uncommon that Customer's will actually grade these initially as "I do not want that feature", only later to say after using the feature that they "Couldn't live without it!". This is why these type of attributes are often called 'Breakthrough".

A new mindset ...You are being measured against companies inside-and outside-your industry that already provide 'out of this world' experiences

It used to be that all we needed to do to make customers happy was to give them a good working product and good service and support.
Now, it's a lot harder to keep our customers happy.

Now they are looking for great product, great service, great price and great support - among other things.

They expect a Great Experience.

And they assess that experience not only on what you provide and what your competitors provide, but also as well as what others provide. Even companies outside of your industry.As an example, not too long ago I took my family to Disney World. if you have ever been there I think you would agree that they go overboard to make you extremely happy.When we got home from that vacation I found out that I had a problem with my laptop, so I spent the night on the phone with (one of the top computer manufacturer's) technicians - not a good experience. The whole time I was comparing the computer manufacturer with my experience at Disney World. While I realized that was not a 'fair' comparison I couldn't help wondering why if Disney could do it, why couldn't they? And that's how your customers think about you.

It's a very small world.