Customer and Stakeholder Focus
Customer and stakeholder concepts
Customer focus starts with understanding requirements, not assuming them. Voice of the customer feeds critical-to-quality characteristics. Segmentation, journey mapping, interviews, complaints, and social listening reveal needs. The Kano model separates must-be, performance, and delighter attributes. Satisfaction is not loyalty; net promoter score measures willingness to recommend and is industry-sensitive; customer effort score targets friction. Stakeholder analysis maps power, interest, legitimacy, and impact. Engagement must be planned: identify, prioritize, communicate, involve, and monitor. Service recovery matters because dissatisfied customers rarely complain to you. They leave or tell others.
Traps
Common traps: treating the loudest customer as representative; using one metric universally; assuming satisfied customers are loyal; ignoring internal customers; mapping stakeholders but never acting; and optimizing one touchpoint while damaging the end-to-end journey. Questions often ask which stakeholder to prioritize. Use impact and legitimacy, not title or volume alone.
Worked example
A utility's satisfaction score is high, but churn rises. Journey mapping shows a painful billing switch. The effort score identifies three unnecessary steps. The team removes them, adds proactive status updates, and tracks first-contact resolution. Effort falls, retention improves, and satisfaction remains stable, showing why one metric is insufficient.
Rule of thumb: measure the customer's effort and outcome, then fix the process that creates the experience.