Balanced Scorecard Strategy For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Understanding Your Role with Customers

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• Knowing the essentials about your customers

• Using customer info to create appropriate measures

• Developing your customer strategies, plans, and tactics

• Staying in touch with your customer and making adjustments

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Understanding customers is difficult for many businesspeople. Heck, many customers don’t even understand themselves. Delivering what customers want, when they want it — and then giving them just a bit more to “delight” them — often seems like an overwhelming task in many organizations. But it is a necessary task. Your workers need to understand how their jobs directly impact your customers instead of focusing solely on day to day tasks, crises, and deliveries. Establishing the customer leg of the balanced scorecard will help you focus your employees on the customer.

“What do our customers value, and what are they willing to pay for?” “How do we know if we’re truly delivering value to our customers?” “How do we know if we’re hitting the mark and dealing with problems before they become customer complaints?” These are just some of the questions your company must answer if you hope to gain as much as possible from your balanced scorecard and, ultimately, from your business.

So, how do you get in touch with your customers to find out what they really value so you can play your role in their lives? And how do you translate that understanding into tangible measures that you can examine ...