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".