Why Customer Driven?


Overview/Description
Target Audience
Expected Duration
Lesson Objectives
Course Number


Overview/Description
Today in America, the emphasis is on service. Health care organizations, insurance agencies, investment brokers, and accountants sell services rather than products. As the popularity of the Internet increases, all companies are forced to focus on service through company web sites that put them into direct contact with customers. Customer satisfaction--and quality--is quickly becoming the value-added feature that can make or break a product or a company. To satisfy customers and give them the quality they want, you need to look at how services and products are viewed by customers. This means asking customers what they want and then tuning your operations to generate these results. This means becoming more customer driven. This course presents an overview of customer-driven process improvement. Simple examples will encourage you to try the approach in your own company.

Target Audience
Managers at all levels, supervisors, staff members, team leaders

Expected Duration (hours)
2.5

Lesson Objectives

Listen to the Customer

  • recognize the benefits of offering a product or service of exceptional quality in today's market.
  • identify the role of service in today's highly competitive market.
  • match the quality criteria categories to examples when given a specific product.
  • identify the steps that must be performed in order to discover the factors that are key to your product's success.

    • A Customer-driven Process

  • recognize the importance of letting customer need determine which processes should be improved.
  • choose the risks of internally focused process improvement.
  • sequence the broad steps in customer-driven process improvement.
  • choose the considerations for selecting a customer-driven process improvement.

    • A Model for Customer-driven Process Improvements

  • recognize the benefit of applying the customer-driven process model.
  • sequence the activities within the first activity block of the customer-driven process improvement model.
  • sequence the remaining steps within a customer-driven process improvement framework that are taken after identifying critical customer needs.
  • choose the correct order of activity blocks within the customer-driven process improvement model.

    • Management's Role

  • recognize the benefits of understanding the role of management in customer-driven process improvement.
  • choose the responsibilities of senior management in customer-driven process improvement efforts.
  • identify the new requirements of middle management and employees caused by customer-driven process improvement.
  • identify the new demands that technology places on process improvement efforts.

    • Course Number:
    OPER0121