Balance is good for more than your diet

It is pretty clear that business success depends on more than the best products at the best price at the right time and in the right color. Marketing can overwhelm those qualities in a competitor and fashion can move a market in the blink of an eye.

At no time is this more the case than in the winning, keeping or losing of a customer relationship. Companies who focus on the product attributes to the exclusion of addressing customer anxieties, however tenuously linked to the goods, often find themselves fighting to keep the contract. And mostly losing.

The notion is particularly ripe, as they say in the law. As the year slows to a close, companies routinely review their relationships. Do we sign on again for another year? Do we shop for a better deal? If we do, should we do it formally or discretely? These matter-of-fact questions can either rage into a fire or die out for a lack of air. The direction often depends on whether the service of the last year met not just the product specs, but customer expectations.

The notion of customer expectations is even more important in light of the fact that no product or service meets all its promises. Cars get recalled, computers freeze up, yogurt passes its freshness date, orders get shipped in pieces and things still get lost in the mail. What allows companies and customers to look past these events is performance.

First and foremost is the way the product or service performs. But equally important is the way companies conduct – or perform – their business. Do they listen? Does their behavior suggest they actually hear? Are they responsive? Is it on a timetable that leads to a market advantage – for the customer? Do they invest? In their products? In the customer relationship?

The questions – metrics – make a long list that can make product performance a lot less relevant that many of us might like. The formula is more complex and compounded for a professional services firm where intellectual property is a hard-to-measure product in the first place.

This is not a new business problem; nor is it one that has not drawn a lot of attention and recently. Some companies have reorganized their sales teams to create global or national account directors so that one person will be persistently close to the customer. Other companies have adopted aggressive customer feedback systems, not just authoring a method by which compliments and criticism can make their way to management, but by soliciting the best and worst. Still others have created customer advocates at the senior-most levels of management.

The goal in each case is to stay close, to anticipate and make sure that product and company performance doesn’t get out of balance, that neither falters and that each meets the spec and unspoken need of customers.