4. Who are your customers?

If you have defined your needs, it is also important for you to ask who are your customers. If you do not define who it is you want to reach then you cannot accurately meet their needs.  Below are examples of the kinds of questions you may need to ask.

If they are students then

  • Are they full-time, part-time, international, mature, or distance students?

  • Are they undergraduates or postgraduates?

  • Are they returning students e.g. have they already completed a first degree at your institution and now want to study at postgraduate level?

  • Are they pursuing a course which is employment based eg. teacher training or nursing?

If they are businesses

  • Are they national, international or global?

  • Are they a small, medium sized or very large business?

  • Are they a new business or a long established one?

  • Have they worked with you before or are they new partners?

  • If they have worked with you before, in what context was that?

  • Do they have a number of other partners and institutions with whom they work or is this a sole partnership?

  • Have they worked with other institutions before, or is this a new venture for them?

If it is the wider community

  • Are they a community group involved with voluntary activities?

  • If so, what is their particular interest eg. is it help for children, the elderly, the disabled, the homeless?

  • Is it a group with an interest in the Arts/Culture or an interest in Sports?

  • Is it someone who might be interested in specific training – an Adult Education Course in coaching skills or effective people management?

  • Is it someone from another institution looking for a workshop, a conference, a seminar, or an exhibition?

Download a template to analyse your institution’s customer group

What changes do you want to make to your customer group?

Having decided who your present customers are, think what changes you would like to make to that group. For example,

  • What extra groups would you like to attract?

  • Are there some groups you would like to be bigger? Perhaps you would like to attract more international students, more postgraduates, or more sponsored students. Perhaps you would like more partnerships with international businesses, or greater involvement with local community groups

  • Would you like to increase the length of your relationship with your customers eg. have life-long relationships with students?

If your customers are businesses or external organizations think how broad you would like your relationship to be.  Would you like to involve them at just one level or multiple levels?

  • Do you want a partnership for research projects?

  • Are you looking for opportunities for student work experience?

  • Are you looking for placement opportunities for students maybe in industry, in hospitals, in schools?

  • Are you looking for sponsorship for postgraduate students?

  • Are you thinking of setting up collaborative courses with industry?

  • Do you want them to be part of a Graduate Recruitment  fair?

Download a template to carry out an analysis of desired change

What do your customers want from you?

You will need to find out what your customers want from you. Therefore you will need to consult with them.

Try to consult with your customers early on in the development process. There is no point in implementing a technologically sophisticated system if you later find that the tools and applications are of no use to those who might actually need to use them.

There are several ways of consulting with customers. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.

The method you choose will depend upon:

  • the amount of time you have available

  • the accessibility of your customers

  • the availability of your customers

  • the resources you have available

There are two main advantages in consulting with customers

  • You will find out what they would actually like from you. This means that your strategy can be formulated on the basis of fact rather than guesswork

  • Consulting with customers has the effect of making them feel included and valued. This provides a great start to any relationship with them

Of course that ‘great start’ will only be maintained if they feel they have been properly heard and their views taken into account. This does not mean you have to accept all their suggestions. It does mean that they are entitled to an explanation as to why any particular suggestion cannot be implemented.

The information gathering cycle

Ask yourself the following questions.

What information do I want to obtain?

Before you consult with your customers, you need to know what information you want to obtain. This will provide the basis of your interview, the stimulus topics for your focus groups and the questions for your questionnaire

How often will I consult with my customers?

Remember:

  • Good CRM is frequently monitored and assessed. Part of that assessment is customer satisfaction

  • Consultation is not a one-off affair. It is an ongoing process

What am I going to do with the information I obtain from my consultations with my customers?

Consider how the information you obtain will feed back into your strategy and plan. Processes have to be in place for this to happen

How will I feed back to my customers?

Remember, a customer’s feeling of value depends not just on being consulted, but on actually being heard

You need to have processes in place for feeding back to your customers, information about the changes that have been implemented as a result of the consultation.
You need to have processes in place for explaining to customers why some of their requests cannot be implemented

A famous quote from Warren Bennis, Professor of Business Administration at the University of S. California states:

“The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows” 

Remember the same applies to an institution!

Methods of consultation

There are three main methods of consultation: focus groups, interviews and surveys or questionnaires.

Focus Groups

  • Focus groups are small discussion groups generally run with 6 – 10 people. Consequently, they access the views of more people than do individual interviews, but not as many as can be accessed through questionnaires

  • They can take quite a large amount of time to plan as they have to fit the work schedules of several people and time has to be given to deciding the right composition

  • They facilitate open discussion of viewpoints as participants bounce ideas of each other and can be a rich source of information

  • Focus groups may not provide generalisable results in the empirical sense but they can provide theoretical generalisability

Questionnaires

  • Questionnaires may be conducted in paper form or online. Online questionnaires have the advantage of quicker access of participants plus electronic storage and analysis of data

  • They have the potential to access the views of all customers and  because of the bigger sample size, it is likely that the views expressed are generalisable

  • They are open to ambiguity in both the questions asked and the responses given and there is little opportunity for clarification or elaboration

  • Participants feel less valued than when giving their views face-to-face

Interviews

  • These may be conducted one-to-one or as a group interview

  • One-to-one interviews are very time-consuming and the collection of fewer opinions means that their results are not generalisable at an empirical level

  • They provide participants with an opportunity for elaboration and there is much less room for ambiguity

  • Participants feel valued in the face-to-face experience

Remember, consultation is not a one-off process. You might want to include some of your customers in a CRM steering/advisory group that you could set up to help support the development. This ensures you get valuable customer input on an ongoing basis.

Download a template to help in analysing your own consultation process

Creating Customer Value

  • When customers are consulted, they are likely to feel valued. 

  • Value is co-created with the customer, not just at the start of the relationship, but throughout

  • Companies/organizations should seek to engage the customer in open dialogue before, during and after the delivery of a service

  • Such interactivity allows the company/organization to learn and rapidly adapt to any changes encountered.  It enables flexibility

  • Customer value is increased when customers are involved in the joint solving of problems that occur

  • Customers co-create value from many different sources besides the straightforward functional value of the product/service being offered.  These include emotional, sensory, social, behavioural, cognitive and relational sources.  It is important to be aware of this and to gather information about these potential sources of value

  • Customer value is co-created by other customers, external experts and opinion leaders. It is co-created by other institutions and your competitors.  It must always be viewed in context

  • Customer value is dependent upon a high level of trust

"

[Consultation] is a wide process that involves utilizing regional and sub regional labour market intelligence as well as working with partner organizations across the immediate area to identify gaps. Also each provider would work with each of their employers individually or in a cluster across a sector to ascertain whether or not there are gaps in the local market. This can be shared with the consortium to ensure the sharing of best practice and maintain strong referral routes and sign posting opportunities.

Doing the Business Case Study (2007)

Mapping Customer Value

It is possible to map customer value. As shown in the picture below, relative perceived benefits are plotted against relative perceived costs. When perceived benefits are exactly balanced by perceived costs, they are said to fall on the fair value line.

Mapping value

The picture is taken from an article on mapping customer value (Dwyer, 2008) and illustrates the relative perceived benefits and costs of staying at different hotels. The country hotel provides only basic amenities, is somewhat noisy but also relatively cheap. Costs and benefits balance out so it is placed on the fair value line. The 5-star Hotel B with all facilities, an excellent chef and very friendly staff is very expensive, but once again the benefits balance out the costs so it is placed on the fair value line. The surly staff at 5-star Hotel A, however, move it away from the fair value line as perceived costs now outweigh the perceived benefits.

Using the Value Map to monitor success

Value maps can be built by going through the following three stages (Dwyer, 2008).

  1. Grouping customers according to their demographics

  2. Finding out from customers what are the important elements of perceived benefits and costs and having them rank these

  3. Finding out how well your institution performs versus its competitors on each element the customer has identified as important to perceived benefits and costs

The value map helps to reveal at a glance whether or not your institution is creating value for the customer. The data that lies beneath it provides the steer for improvement. A template is available to assess whether or not your institution is creating customer value

Dwyer suggests that an added advantage of value mapping is that it can help identify where there may be market gaps. A value map showing competitors at the high end and the low end of the fair value line may also be showing you that there is a zone of unmet needs waiting to be filled!

Mapping value

Customer Experience Management

Creating customer value enhances the customer experience. CRM at its best focuses on customer experience as an essential component. The following quote from Peppers and Rogers (2007) is a useful reminder that when planning any CRM implementation we should not forget to consider how things appear from the customer’s point of view.

"

...CRM, that's how a customer looks to a company ...CEM, that's really how the company looks to the customer.  In way too many cases, the way a customer looks to a company is sort of the way prey looks to a vulture.

Peppers and Rogers (2007)

Customer Experience Management in Higher and Further Education

In November 2005, ARAMARK Education prepared a report entitled Customer Experience Management: Competing successfully in Higher Education. Below are some of the points they stress in terms of enhancing the customer experience and increasing customer value - both for the customer and for the institution.

  • Remember your website will also create a positive or negative experience

  • Assess your current service delivery by mapping the touchpoints for individual customers.

  • Obtain feedback from your customers about those touchpoints. Find out what works well and what causes frustration.  Evaluate the feedback and address areas of complaint.

  • Eliminating points of frustration goes a long way towards improving the customer experience.

  • Ensure that mechanisms are in place for regular customer feedback and that customers are aware of these

  • Communicate the uniqueness and quality of the customer experience you are offering to other potential customers

  • Continually measure the results of your efforts. Obtain customer feedback and staff feedback as well as any changes in business and community engagement.

  • Monitor the actions of your competitors – what lessons can you learn from them?

Read an example of how one FEC is using CRM to increase customer value

Key points to remember about creating customer value

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Define carefully who your actual customers are
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Decide which groups you would like to expand, which additional groups you would like to reach, which relationships you would like to develop
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Engage in open dialogue with your customers before, during and after the implementation
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Choose a method of consultation that is appropriate to your time and resources
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Remember, customer value is co-created by other customers and by your competitors
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Use value maps to assess whether or not your institution is creating value for customers

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