Business opportunities

The door to business opportunities:

Different purposes, different selection criteria, different vendors; same product, but at differing quality levels. Neeta’s purpose controlled her selection criteria. To understand what your customers expect and what keeps them coming back again and again, you need to understand why they choose your product or service. You need to understand their purpose— the customer’s “why.” What purpose were they fulfilling when they consumed your product or service?
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei (2017-12-19). Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 436-439). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Three components of a product or service: design, implementation, and service delivery

the product design must be right, the implementation must be right, and the service delivery must also live up to expectations. If any one of these elements isn’t good enough, disappointment ensues, resulting in poor reviews and a lack of recommendations.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei (2017-12-19). Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 293-294). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Designing Fit-for-Purpose Products & Services

The lesson to take from this is that different market segments— customers with different purposes, different goals, and different risks to manage— need different designs, different fidelity in implementation, and different classes of service. If you have a range of functional designs, but just one level of implementation and one class of service, you may not be serving the market properly. In Chapter 7 we discussed the idea that if Silicon Valley was in the pizza business there would be 1,024 designs, but little attention would be paid to suitable levels of implementation, and service delivery would be inadequate, ad hoc, or at least highly unreliable. This is because many of these businesses value ingenuity and product design above implementation capability or customer service.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 2858-2863). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

we believe that adopting an understanding of a customer’s purpose, their “why,” segmenting your market based on “why,” and building an understanding of the criteria customers use to select your product or service is a far better way to ensure satisfied customers, repeat business, and future recommendations.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 551-553). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

businessman's insight: "technology innovation" VS "service delivery innovation"

If your market isn’t homogeneous— and it almost always isn’t— offering a variety of classes of service for what is otherwise the same functional product is an incredibly powerful way to exploit and extract greater value from a market. Innovation in service delivery, sometimes called “business model innovation” can be powerful. For product companies relying on technology innovation, the alternative of service delivery innovation can often be faster and cheaper to bring to market than a new product.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 2901-2905). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Classes of service are a powerful tool. Class of service determines how a customer or their order will be treated based on their needs or the price they paid. When designing a class of service, think about how you can make something faster, with more choices, or with higher quality. Align classes of service with fitness criteria and thresholds. When designing a service, always consider economics and don’t overserve a segment or market at the expense of profitability.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 3072-3076). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Bloatware is a term to describe a problem that has challenged the high-tech industry for decades. It refers to products containing too many features trying to satisfy too many customer purposes. All the extra functionality makes the product cumbersome to use for any specific purpose and the bloat becomes a dissatisfier, exposing the product to a risk of disruption by a simpler, more focused market insurgent. Web and mobile platform technologies have created an opportunity to move away from bloatware toward a family of products or services tailored to individual market segments based on purpose.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 3078-3082). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Some markets are segmented naturally by usage. In such markets, the Fit-for-Purpose Framework adds less value. as the product and service design already map well to the purpose.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 3077-3078). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Leaders who value customer satisfaction, who believe they “know why [we] fly,” need to value design, implementation, and service delivery in equal measure. They need to elevate the importance of all three elements within their firms. They can do this by using the Fit-for-Purpose Framework and by developing individual capability and management talent in each of the three dimensions. Leaders need to celebrate great achievement in implementation and service delivery and not just the intellectually seductive design element.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 2051-2055). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Customer-facing staff(the important position) are often the lowest paid, you know, are you sure?

customer-facing staff. The staff member who takes the order and the delivery boy who delivers the pizza have the most valuable information their business needs for long-term survival— why their customers select them and what they hope to achieve with their product or service. If you have a social media team providing online customer service, then your staff monitoring Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat will learn fairly quickly how your changes are affecting your customers. Interestingly, for many tangible goods physical businesses, the people who know most about the customer “why” are often the lowest paid, shortest tenured staff members. Many businesses don’t value their customer interface, their customer-facing staff. They treat these personnel as fungible commodities and accept high levels of staff turnover. There is no institutional memory and little learning. Valuable information— almost impossible to acquire even via expensive market research— leaves with every employee’s exit.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei (2017-12-19). Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 490-497). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

To understand your customers, you need direct customer connection. Your frontline staff provide that mechanism. You need to train them to pay attention, to listen, to chat up customers, to record stories, to look for patterns. If you don’t have a connection to your customers because of industry delamination, then you need to get out of the building. We’ve worked with mobile.de, the DACH (consisting of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) region’s leading source for the resale of vehicles, boats, and anything with an engine. Developers of mobile.de’s mobile application found they could learn more by hanging out in Berlin cafés and asking passersby to look at new prototypes than they could from studying usage, downloads, or online reviews.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 1866-1871). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Many airlines currently aspire to fully automate the check-in and boarding experience, completely eliminating their human staff from the process. Different airlines are at different stages in this process. Some require passengers to print out boarding passes themselves before coming to the airport. Others have self-operated baggage tagging machines requiring passengers to print and attach baggage tags to their own luggage. Most have automated check-in machines. The current wave of automation involves automated checks for security lines, and automated boarding. The goal is to reach a position within the next few years where human staff are only required to handle exceptions rather than every customer. Airline chief executives such as Alex Cruz at British Airways see automation as a means to cut costs and increase margins. This choice doesn’t come without risks. If automating your frontline and eliminating the customer-facing human element is inevitable in your business, then developing a capability to use Fitness Box Score surveys is essential for the ongoing and future success of your business. If it isn’t inevitable that you replace the human face of your business with machines, perhaps it’s time to consider investing more in your frontline presence and developing it as a first-class sensing mechanism for your marketing strategy. How much is that information worth? We believe it provides a high return on investment. You can turn your superior market sensing capability and your richer customer intimacy into a competitive advantage.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 1909-1919). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Throughout this book we strongly emphasize high quality, direct customer interaction and the value that a human face on your front line can bring to your business.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 1986-1987). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

Identify different customer segments and design different service levels to match their different fitness criteria. Treating your market homogeneously can lead to a focus on cost cutting and customer dissatisfaction. Treating different market segments differently can make your products and services fit-for-purpose while relieving staff from overburdening.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 2056-2059). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

humans in the front line or automation:

Throughout this book, we have strongly advocated for humans in the front line, sensing the complexity in the market. For some of our readers, this is going to sound terribly old-school. Some of you may be deeply involved in automating your front line, or you’re in businesses such as mobile applications where there is no concept of a human front line because the entire customer interface and distribution channel is automated with technology. If you are working in these sorts of markets, then thank you for sticking with us this far into the book. We appreciate it!
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 3226-3230). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

scale size:

Understanding customers intimately in large-scale markets is challenging. While technology exists to gather feedback, it is hard to properly understand customers’ true purposes without direct contact at relatively human scales of one vendor staff member to less than 150 customers.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 3415-3417). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.

The Complexity determine to use humans in the front line:

Like many business books, this text describes many simple, one-dimensional metrics. Metrics are generally better understood as probability distributions and coupled in pairs of measures, so that one measure acts as a feedback mechanism and constraint upon the other. You should generally beware of experts touting pursuit of simple numbers as the magic solution to business success.
---Anderson, David J; Zheglov, Alexei. Fit for Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy, & Keep Customers (Kindle Locations 3413-3415). Blue Hole Press. Kindle Edition.