Today's boss is busy. A director works an average of 9.7 hours a day and also conducts business on 79% of weekend days, an average of 3.9 hours a day, and on 70% of vacation days, an average of 2.4 hours a day. Working hard is great, of course, but are all those hours invested in the right topics? In what focal points do you, as a leader, want to invest your time?
Holding up a lot of signs
Directors must hold many signs high. They must deal with risk, respond to changing laws and regulations, be alert to technological advances, strive for innovation, and they must pay close attention to finding the right people and creating the right culture.
The most important sign is called growth
According to an IBM survey, successful executives are primarily concerned with finding new ways to grow. One way they do this is by looking for new products or services, new business models, pursuing innovations or expanding geographically.
A slight majority (51 percent) of directors surveyed consider growth more important than achieving cost efficiency. Long-term growth is more important than short-term profitability. Growth through mergers and acquisitions is booming, but independent and organic growth is still very important.
Growing organically with new customers
One way to grow is to win new customers. Winning new customers is usually an expensive process. Communication, marketing and sales are expensive, and it costs a fortune all together to gain market share at the expense of competitors.
Thereby, a growth plan requires time and execution power and success is not guaranteed. Each new customer comes with a hefty price tag, which must be recouped over the course of the customer relationship.
And lose half of your customers again
An average company loses half of its customers over the course of five years. Knowing that it is five to twenty-five times more expensive to gain new customers than to retain existing ones, that is a wrenching fact. So after winning new customers, your mission should be to retain them. But how do you do that? What is the key to effective customer retention.
In classic marketing thinking , attention is the magic word. If you don't give your customers proper attention, they get the feeling that you no longer care about them. That lack of attention explains 68% of churn, as runaway behavior is called in marketing terms.
Besides the classic panacea of attention, something else is at play, especially for B2B companies. B2B customers are increasingly mirroring their experiences as private consumers. Their experiences with companies like IKEA, Coolblue and bol.com have formed new standards. Those have a lot to do with convenience and good communication. And also with the online performance of those companies.
Are you a construction company, an installer, a cookie factory or a transportation company? Then you are increasingly being mirrored in terms of convenience, communication and online presentation or online processes to the experience people have with companies as consumers. Coolblue is the new standard, no matter what your business is.
One system for performance improvement and customer retention
Okay, you now know what to do and you set to work to improve your organization so that far fewer customers walk away. To do that, you set KPIs and follow a PDCA cycle to repeatedly plan, execute, check and adjust. You do this for several years in a row, seeing your organization continually improve and noticing that fewer customers are walking away. You've found your way to structural organic growth. Congratulations!
The reality, of course, is often different. The focus is missing or blurred, no PDCA cycle is set up and the noses are not in the same direction. The improvement process requires a lot of guidance and good intentions perish due to a lack of implementation power.
A system of continuous improvement demands - nay screams - (automated) process support. Support in which you record exactly what your KPIs are and what measures you set up to achieve them. A system that shows where and when deviations occur and that encourages connected employees to make adjustments. A system that connects the entire organization to the process of continuous improvement. And a system that also continuously measures what customers think of it and whether they experience the intended improvements as such.
Some smart director deploys his KAM manager or QHSE manager to organize the process of continuous improvement and guide it in its implementation. But a really smart director also immediately gives that manager powerful software that facilitates the process of continuous quality improvement and reports back online embedded customer satisfaction measurements in real time and without manual intervention.
Executives and their KAM/QHSE managers together on the road to growth
ISO2HANDLE creates software for organizations that want to manage Quality, Risk and Customer Experience in an automated, continuous and real-time manner. Available as a SaaS solution, the software is a powerful, flexible and effective tool for KAM-/QHSE Managers and their boards. Over 750 companies are now effectively using the ISO2HANDLE solution.
Executives who (along with their Quality Managers) want to get an exploratory introduction to ISO2HANDLE are welcome to open the conversation.
