NETTING IT OUT

In this updated version of the discussion of the sixth critical success factor presented in Customers.com, we discuss how helping customers do their jobs can make your company’s products and services invaluable to your customer base. By helping them succeed in their jobs, you ensure that they will remain loyal to your products, services, and organization. The important factors in helping customers do their jobs include:
•    Develop a deep understanding of how your customers do their jobs.
•    Continuously refine your business processes to make it easier for customers to do their jobs.
•    Give customers direct access to your inventory.
•    Give customers the ammunition and tools they need to make purchasing decisions.
•    Prepare bills the way your customers need them.
•    Make it easy for your customers to satisfy their customers.

UPDATING THE CUSTOMERS.COM CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS (CSFs)
The Eight CSFs

In Customers.com, we identified eight critical success factors for making it easy for your cus-tomers to do business with you. The CSFs are:
•    Target the right customers
•    Own the customer’s total experience
•    Streamline business processes that impact the customer
•    Provide a 360-degree view of the customer relationship
•    Let customers help themselves
•    Help customers do their jobs
•    Deliver personalized service
•    Foster community

In this report, we update the sixth critical success factor, Help Customers Do Their Jobs.

HELP CUSTOMERS DO THEIR JOBS

The advances in business-to-business ecommerce create a double-edged sword: while it makes it much easier for you to interact with your business customers and be quickly responsive to their needs, it also has removed many of the barriers for your customers to switch suppliers. So what can you do to keep your B2B customers loyal? When your customers are business people who use your product or service in their jobs, you need to do more than just make it easy for them to get information, place orders, check on the status of orders, and get help. Those are all prerequisites. To win over business customers, you need to understand exactly where your product fits within customers’ business days (or nights!), how they need to use it, and how you can make it easier for them to do so.

Consumer customers have “jobs” to do, too. Whether they are planning a vacation, designing a garden, paying bills, or planning and hosting a dinner party, they have things they need to do, with desired outcomes they need to achieve. The better you understand what your customers are trying to accomplish, the more likely you are to be able to help them reach their desired result. The chances are good that the product or service you offer is just one of many resources required for your prospective customers to accomplish their desired result.

Here are some of the key ingredients you’ll want to be sure you get right:
•    Develop a deep understanding of how your customers do their jobs.
•    Continuously refine your business processes to make it easier for customers to do their jobs.
•    Give customers direct access to your in-ventory.
•    Give customers the ammunition and tools they need to make purchasing decisions.
•    Prepare bills the way your customers need them.
•    Make it easy for your customers to satisfy their customers.

Of course, what you’re really trying to do is to make your business a necessary extension of your customers’ businesses. The points listed here are really the bare minimum. The companies that excel in this area have become so electronically intertwined with their customers that it is sometimes difficult to tell where one company stops and the other begins. This borderless business model has become the way successful organizations do business in the 21st century.

DEVELOP A DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF HOW YOUR CUSTOMERS DO THEIR JOBS

National Semiconductor is a good example of a company that has invested in understanding how its customers do their jobs. Back in the mid 1990s, one of the first steps Phil Gibson (then director of interactive marketing) and his team took was to run focus groups of analog design engineers, to interview them and to watch how they did their jobs. The team discovered how designers researched the capabilities of available products, how they wanted to be able to search for chips based on the parameters they needed (e.g., low voltage, a certain price point, a particular function, or a minimum clock speed), and that these engineers needed the information and tools required to evaluate the chips for their project. So, starting more than a decade ago, National made it easy for engineers to download detailed data sheets, download software simulations, and order sample chips, each with a single click. But that was just the very beginning....