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What's the Customer
Focus Manager?
The Customer Focus Manager (CFM) is an instrument that puts hard numbers
on the “soft” issues of customer focus in your company.
How? It’s really quite simple: you ask the experts to score your
customer focus.
Who are the experts? The men and women on the work floor who are
dealing with customers every day, who know their complaints and who know how it
can be done better!
The Customer Focus Manager
1. Get all hands to participate
All you have to do is ask your managers and staff to
complete the “Customer Focus Assessment form and you will
get a very clear idea where you need to get busy making improvements.
A list of 22 customer factors is evaluated by the participants for two aspects:
- What is the status of each factor in our company today?
- What priority should be given to improving the factor?
The tool is used anonymously. But if managers and staff identify
themselves by department, you can make comparisons among the
departments for internal benchmarking. And each department can get
output to discuss improvements in their area.
2. Review your CFM Report
Based on the Customer Focus questionnaire, a CFM report is
produced showing:
- Scores measuring the current situation of each factor;
- Scores measuring the priority for improvement of each
factor;
- A “Gap” score measuring the difference between the current
situation and priority for improvement. The higher the gap,
the higher the need to improve the factor.
3. Review your CFM “Gap Chart”
Your customer focus scores are then converted into a “Gap
Chart”, which visualizes where the problems are. The example below
is very representative of what we have seen in thousands of
CFA studies in the past 15 years.
- Very few companies measure customer profitability and
customer satisfaction.
- Managers assess their customer focus higher than the staff, but admit
that they do not devote enough time to the process.
- Employees tend to assess their customer focus higher than
managers, expressing doubt about management commitment and contradicting
management’s claim to set a good example.
- Customer contact planning always produces a big gap - people see
that it is important, but it is not often done.
- The lowest situation scores and highest “gaps” are inevitably allocated
to the six items relating to customer information and IT-systems.
4. Analyze your “Overall Priorities”
Next you rank the “gaps” of all customer focus factors, regardless
of domain. The dashboard indicates which factors need to be improved.
- Red: Immediately
- Yellow: Sooner rather than
later
- Green: No attention needed for
the time being—but check again later
5. Analyze your “Priorities per domain”
This report shows the improvement priorities per domain.
Departments and groups can be assigned to develop and carry
out improvement plans for each domain.
6. Plan Customer Focus Improvements
You can then form Improvement Groups for each domain to develop
and carry out action plans with this planning tool.
7. Benchmark Company vs. Department
You can then benchmark the Company vs. Department Gaps. You
can also benchmark your company gaps with all other companies,
or a selection of companies in the database.
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