The question runs through every board, every CEO, every steering committee: what are our customers thinking? It leads straight to the next one: what can we do about it? The thinking is not new. Voice of the customer goes back to Toyota's quality programmes in the late 1970s, through the Baldrige awards, into Six Sigma and lean. Decades of publications, toolboxes and real-time feedback systems, and yet the real customer thinking rarely reaches the decision makers in a form they can use. The Wall Street Journal has noted that as many as 60% of improvement initiatives ultimately fail.
The operational reasons are well studied. The strategic point is simpler: your customers decide whether you succeed, so their view has to be an input to strategic decisions, gathered in a structured way, not a satisfaction score read once a year.
Five things to ask
How your products and services perform against competitors, through the customer's eyes. Which criteria matter most when they buy, and how those are weighted. What they will need in two to three years that nobody offers yet. Which of your competitors they rate higher, and why. What would make them buy more, or leave.
Then what
The answers go onto the product-market matrix as the market reality check: for each priority cell, does the market agree with our view of it? In our experience that check always changes the internal read. It reorders priorities, kills a pet product, or reveals a segment nobody was serving. It is tool 3B in the MOVE® system for that reason, and it is never skipped.
Monday
Pick your most important customer segment. Write the three reasons you believe they buy from you. Then ask five of them the same question this week, in person. Compare the lists.
