Customer-Centered Thinking

1. Products focus our vision outward to customers. A product is something created by work which can be given to someone else. Organize quality and customer satisfaction initiatives around products and their intended outcomes.


2. Customers (end-users, brokers, fixers) can only be identified by their relationship to specific products.


3. End-users always win in the long run. Unfortunately, we often spend too much time attending exclusively to the needs of “brokers”, to the temporary disadvantage of end-users.


4. Performance, perception and outcome are the basis for satisfaction. Customers have expectations about both the attributes of a product (performance and perception) and the outcomes to be achieved by using the product.


5. Always assume customer wants are unmet. Our tendency is to assume we know what they want. When this happens, we are likely to give customers what we think they should expect. What customers expect is not necessarily what they want. Assuming we don't know prompts us to ask.


6. What we measure is what we value. Measurement is management's way of saying “we care.” Customer priorities such as ease-of-use, timeliness and certainty often go unmeasured.


7. Without knowing what we do (produce knowledge products), who we do it for (end-users), what they want and why (outcomes), how we do it (process) is irrelevant. Organizations typically emphasize process improvements without first adequately assessing whether they are producing products which meet customers’ outcome expectations.


8. Eliminate and consolidate before we automate. These are three tactics for improving process and product flow within a process. Avoid the rush to automate before considering the first two possibilities.


9. Process improvement, not positively experienced by customers, is a competitive mirage.


10. Vital lies are constraints on any change initiative. Vital lies are the justifications (often unfounded or inappropriate) we offer in support of current practices.