Exceeding Customer Expectations

We often focus on meeting customer expectations by closing the gap between customer perceptions and expectations. There’s a difficulty in meeting expectations because of all the factors that must be coordinated to deliver on the firm’s service promises. However, an increasingly popular service maxim urges companies to “exceed customer expectations.”—to delight, excite, surprise, and otherwise amaze. According to this formulated belief, merely meeting customer expectations is not enough; a company must exceed them to retain customers. This is an appealing slogan as well as one that sets a high performance standard for employees, but it holds the potential to overpromise to both customers and employees. In attempting to exceed customer expectations, a company must understand a) what type of expectations can and should be exceeded, b) what customer group or segment is to be targeted, and c) the impact exceeding  expectations has on future expectations of customers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Good Pricing Decisions

Pricing decisions draw on many areas of marketing expertise. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the forces that shape the market, including competitive  interactions, technology and consumer psychology. Sometimes these forces interact and are likely to put downward pressure on prices, such as substitutes, technological advances, price-driven competition, customer experience, and changes in internal focus, such as sales forecasts. Customer makes it difficult to raise prices, as repeat customers’ ability to perceive incremental value of a company’s product or service diminishes over time, especially as substitute or competitive products emerge. Increased internal expectations in the form of expected sales increases or new budgets can send prices on a downward spiral. Customer price sensitivity may also serve  to keep prices in check, especially in the presence of available competitive substitutes or among a company’s marginal customers.

Even in a deflationary economy, there are opportunities for keeping prices from dropping or even for raising prices. However, customers must perceive that these enhancements deliver a genuine, meaningful benefit, or they will continue to seek lower cost alternatives.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Dark Side of Technology

Although there is clearly great potential for technology to support brand new product concepts, provide new ways of delivering service, and enable consumers and employees in achieving better quality products and services, there are potential negative outcomes as well. There are many paradoxes of technology products and services for consumers. Technology can assimilate people while isolating them; it can provide a sense of control and at the same time feelings of ineptitude.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The Aging Crisis

Not a company exists whose management doesn’t say, at least for public consumption, that it wants an organization flexible enough to adjust quickly to changing market conditions, lean enough to beat any competitor’s price, innovative enough to keep its products and services technologically fresh, and dedicated enough to deliver maximum quality and consumer service.

So, if managements want companies that are lean, nimble, flexible, responsive, competitive, innovative, efficient, customer-focused, and profitable, why are so many. Companies are bloated, clumsy, rigid, sluggish, non-competitive, uncreative, inefficient, disdainful of customer needs, and losing money. The answers lie in how these companies do their work and why they do it that way.

Corporations do not perform badly because workers are lazy and managements are inept. Just the same, the record of industrial and technological accomplishment over the past century is proof enough that managements are not inept and workers do work.

Inflexibility, unresponsiveness, the absence of customer focus, an obsession with activity rather than result, bureaucratic paralysis, lack of innovation, high overhead—these are the legacies of industrial leadership. These characteristics are not new; they have not suddenly appeared. They have been present all along. If costs are high they can be passed on to customers. If customers are dissatisfied, they have nowhere else to turn. If new products are slow in coming, customers will wait. The important managerial job is to manage growth, and the rest doesn’t matter. Now that growth has flattened out, the rest matters a great deal.

The business problem is that in 21^st century with companies designed during the nineteenth century to work well in the twentieth—we need something different.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Macro-Marketing System

A macro-marketing system delivers goods and services to consumers. It also allows mass production with its economies of scale. Also mass communication and mass transportation allow products to be shipped where they’re needed. In addition to making mass production possible, a marketing directed, macro-marketing system encourages innovation—the development and spread of new ideas and products. Competition for consumers’ money forces firms to think of new and better ways of satisfying consumer needs. Marketing activity is especially open to criticism because it is the part of business most visible to the public.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Cost Leadership Strategy

A cost leadership strategy is an integrated set of actions designed to produce or deliver goods or services at the lowest cost, relative to that of competitors, with features that are acceptable to customers.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Self-Directed Work Teams

A self-directed work team is a group of employees responsible for an entire work process or segment that delivers a product to an internal or external customer. Sometimes called self-managed teams or autonomous work groups, self-directed work teams reduce the need for extra layers of management and thus can help control costs. Such teams are designed to give employees a feeling of ownership of a whole job. With shared team responsibility for work outcomes, team members often have broader job assignments and cross-team to master other jobs, thus permitting greater team flexibility.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Organizational Philosophy Statements

Ford Motor Company: “Quality is job 1!”

L. L. Bean: “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings, and they’ll always come back for more.”

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company: “Quality is the key to our future success.”

Xerox: “Leadership through quality.”

Federal Express: “People—Service—Profit.”

Ritz Carleton: “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”

Citicorp Savings of California: “To consistently deliver a differential level of service so exceptional and so unexpected that it becomes a vehicle for the acquisition of profitable new relationships as well as the retention and growth of existing ones.”

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Speed and Time

Speed and time measures are very important factors to many customers. The speed with which your company can deliver, whatever it provides, can actually gain you competitive advantage and allow you to offer higher satisfaction, and maybe even demand, or ask a price premium from your customers for that convenience of doing things faster or quicker. However it is not just about the core product, it is also about every single contact or initiation with a customer, from answering the telephone, to replying letters, to the length of a phone call, to how long you’ve been put on hold etc. the customer measures all these factors, largely unconsciously.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

New Product Concept

Webster’s says a concept is an idea or an abstract notion. Businesspeople use the term concept for the product promise, the customer proposition, and the real reason why people should buy. It is a stated relationship between product features (form of technology) and consumer benefits—a claim of proposed satisfactions. This promise is open to four interpretations:

• The producer’s perception of the features of the new product.
• The consumer’s perception of the features of the new product.
• The producer’s estimate of the benefits delivered by that set of features.
• The consumer’s estimate of the benefits delivered by that set of features.

These are only forecasts, guesses, at this time—not reality, even with a prototype in hand. They rest on expectations.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.