Customer Focusing is a technique for identifying the customers, products/services, quality characteristics, and performance measures which are most important to your business unit. Managers often take it for granted that all staff are working towards the same customer oriented objectives. Conducting a session in the way described below will show that this is often not the case, and will contribute significantly towards correcting the situation.

Do Customer Focusing when you begin any major review of business activities, or whenever you need to affirm your key customer and product orientation, for example, when,

• there is a major change in your strategic direction

• new products or services are added

The technique can also be used successfully to identify key factors to include in a Quality Policy Statement.

How to focus

A Customer Focusing session is designed for staff working together in a particular business or business unit. For example, the General Manager and senior managers reporting directly to him or her, or the manager of a production unit and the supervisors of each section of the factory. The session should ideally be led by a facilitator who is not directly involved in the business unit's activities. For a senior management group this should be a consultant, or perhaps a non-executive director. For other management groups the facilitator can be someone from, for example, the training dept. The session can be run by a member of the group, but this person must be careful not to lead or bias the opinions of the group in any way.

The facilitator takes the group through the following steps.

• Distribute an Orientation Worksheet and an Instruction Sheet to each member of the group. Pro-formas for both of these are given at the end of this document; take as many copies as you need from these.

• Go through the Instruction Sheet item by item and ensure that everyone is clear on what to write in each section of the worksheet. The worksheet contains six boxes, each of which contains five numbered lines. Group members must write in the boxes what they regard as the five most important types of customers, outputs, values, and measures for their business unit (these must be written in order of importance). `Outputs' are divided into `products' and `services'.

• Once clear on what to write, ask the group members to complete their worksheets. This should be done individually. There should be no discussion during this stage of the exercise.

• Allow about 10 minutes for the worksheets to be completed. Once everyone is finished, rule up a flipchart as shown in the illustration below.
  

• Ask one of the group to read out what they wrote in the first box `customers' on their worksheet and write their answers down the leftmost side of the flipchart table.

• Then ask the next person. Record this person's answers by putting a number in the column corresponding to the ranking they gave to each customer type. If this person nominated any customer types not specified by the first person, write these in below the first person's responses.

• Continue around the group summarising their worksheet responses in this way as you go.

• When all responses have been noted your flipchart should look something like the illustration below.
  

• There will be a lot of lively discussion about the customer classifications and rankings chosen as they are written up on the flipchart. The degree to which group members' views differ will indicate how much potential there is to focus the business unit's objectives and priorities better.

• Take the group through this flipchart evaluation for each of the boxes on the worksheet. By the end of the session the group will have developed a much stronger common view of their overall purpose.

Instruction Sheet

Customers - List the company's five most important customer groups or types in order of importance. For example, for a photographic film manufacturer these may be snapshot photographers, amateur/hobby photographers, professional photographers, etc.

Outputs - Products - List the company's five most important product groups or types in order of importance. For example, average speed print film, high speed print film, average speed slide film, etc.

Outputs - Services - List the five most important services provided to customers in order of importance. Services cover any company activity seen as benefiting customers directly whether a charge is made or not. For example, for a photographic film company these may include, technical advice for film users, technical advice for film processors, training for retailers, "how to" manuals for photographers, etc.

Values - Products - List the five characteristics of the company's products which are most important to customers, in order of importance. For example, for photographic film these may be consistency/reliability of results, availability, price, shelf life, etc.

Values - Services - As for products but in relation to services provided. Examples of value characteristics are, reliability, expertise, speed, accessibility, etc

Measures - List the five most important measures of the business unit's success.

Orientation Worksheet