Avoid the crisis with the Uncommon Service methodology.

28 Mar Avoid the crisis with the Uncommon Service methodology.

Avoid the crisis by understanding what is essential for your customers

Understanding your customer has always been important for a business to stay well and to avoid crisis.

In 2016, with the economy in recession and all the instability of the moment, this concept became essential for any company to keep breathing in the current scenario.

Working in a consulting company that integrates corporate solutions (ERP), I noticed that even with the economic setback, IT projects don't stop.

Despite tighter budgets, customers continue to have a constant demand and, perhaps, are demanding with the results obtained, more than ever, in order to avoid the crisis in their companies.

The great challenge is to carry out these projects with excellence in a not-so-good scenario. Finding the balance between keeping your current customers, doing a good job of getting new customers and using only the bare essentials in terms of cost/effort is the triad of staying profitable.

The problem is that difficult times we can only use what is essential:

1. Essential costs.

2. Essential hour/man

3. Essential stress attributes.

As a manager of Support-fix, an IT services area in the ERP segment, we are in contact with customers 10 hours a day, every day.

Understanding your needs is essential to keeping the wheel turning.

Some value speed in the resolution of IT calls, others value impeccable quality, and some value a personalized service for the company with each call.

They are demanding customers, who often demand different needs at the same time. Customers that generate complex demands, which need maximum alignment between the teams involved.

“If I asked my buyers what they wanted, they would have said it was a faster horse. ” Henry Ford said this decades ago and it still makes perfect sense today. The problem is that if we don't ask in an objective way what customers want, we won't sell either cars or horses, because the customer will simply buy from another supplier who listens to him and understands him.

Understanding this need to fully listen/understand the customer, we sought a methodology that would fit into our service delivery process and help us with this objective.

That's where Uncommon Service methodology comes in.

The methodology, presented in the book by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, is based on understanding what is really essential for the customer and creating an excellent value offer on top of that.

The proposition is that to achieve this excellence it will be necessary to leave aside attributes and secondary actions that are not so important and generate extra costs in projects.

The objective is to disseminate the Uncommon Service as a management methodology in times of crisis. After all, it allows:

Deeply understand customers and their needs. In a way to be able to differentiate between what they want and what they need.

Focus on developing a value proposition for this client, based on studies and dynamics.

Measuring attributes of my business that didn't mean much to my client and being able to eliminate them.

Reduce costs and redirect efforts.

All these items are useful in difficult times and in order to avoid the crisis. They help not only to reduce costs and better distribute our team, but also to retain customers by simply listening to them and generating improvements for them.

Let's simplify in 6 easy steps how you can test the Uncommon Service methodology:

Simplifying the Uncommon Service methodology – In 6 steps.

1. The first step is to identify the attributes of your service. Examples: Speed in the delivery of proposals, quality in the resolution of demands, affordable costs, among others.
2. At this stage, we need to reduce the attributes that do not demand efforts or relevant costs. For example: Visibility of the service (status, consultant, duration, etc.). This is an attribute that the vast majority of service providers offer and that all call systems have. It is an attribute that your service must have and at the same time does not demand any additional cost, after all, all systems on the market offer it.
3. Having this list dry, you perform a dynamic within the company in order to order the attributes by degree of importance. At this point, you are having a vision of what you “think” is more or less important to the customer.
4. This is the most important part of the entire process. Take the attributes from step 2 and conduct a survey with your customers. At this point, it is essential that you do not influence your customer in any way. Example: do not forward an ordered listing. Let it rank the attributes by itself. Take an average of the answers obtained and you will have a vision of what is really more or less important to them. At this point, you also ask your customer for an assessment of your performance and that of your competitor in each attribute.
5. At the end of step 4, we will have the following visions: what does your company “he thinks” which is more or less important to your customers, which It is more or less important for your customers, the your performance on each attribute and the performance of the your competitor.
6. With these results it is possible to set goals to improve the performance of the most important items for your customer. Always having the objective that its performance is greater than that of its competitors.

So I can't be good at everything?

You can find an example in the book called “Unreachable Triangle”. This triangle is the junction of QUALITY + SPEED + PRICE. It is called unattainable because it is impossible for a company to maintain the 3 high standards at the same time. If you can get quality and speed, your service is likely to be expensive. If you get price and speed, your service may lack quality. If you can get price and quality, it will take time to complete the service.

This example shows us that yes, you can try to be good at everything, but you shouldn't. Trying to have the best price, the best quality and the fastest delivery of service can drain your human resources, blow your budget or just go wrong at some point because it is extremely complex, and sometimes unnecessary.

In general terms, the Uncommon Service Methodology defends that companies should be “dare to be bad” in some respects, eliminating areas or activities where they are underperforming, while focusing on and leveraging others that can give you a winning competitive advantage.

In other words, companies should focus on the attributes that their customers really value and not those they think are important to them. That's why exercise is so important. You visualize where your customer sees an advantage and build that advantage for him. In addition, this technique is important to avoid the crisis.

The Methodology includes several techniques and actions aimed at enhancing the provision of services, whether or not added to the physical sale of products, based on analyzes of the perception of the attributes of value recognized by customers, comparative research on the competition and the development of specific plans of optimization and change.

Luiz Fernando – Support-fix Manager