As organizations and organizational units adopt more customer-focused strategies, there is a need to better understand what customers really want.   Although firms can invest years and decades in marketing research on this question, they can also choose to obtain 90% of the value in a single day by facilitating an honest discussion with key leaders and customers.

 Those who have adopted the quality/process view believe that the first step is to confirm that customers mostly (only) care about the perceived value of final results.  They will pay for a value added process or feature, but don’t care about other activities.  Richard Schonberger proposed that all customer needs can fit into a small number of categories, which can be used to define and prioritize the findings.

Customers value final product or service quality.  More today than before; and more tomorrow than today.  Some customers value process quality, because it reduces their risk, serves their customers or is required by regulators.  What quality level is required to remain in business, to meet expectations or to differentiate a product?

Customers value delivery speed.  Product lead times have fallen from weeks to days to hours to minutes.  Service delivery is sometimes measured in seconds. 

Customers value flexibility.  They expect your firm to have the capacity to meet their orders within standard lead times.  They expect you to make exceptions.  As in the Pink Panther movies, they may agree to a standard lead time or capacity, but when they need an exception, they want you to ignore what they told you before.  Expectations regarding flexibility vary widely across industries and firms and can change rapidly.

Customers seek value.  They want lower prices or total cost of ownership.  They want features and benefits that are cost-effective, which meet their needs or which are market leading.  This is a very broad category, but firms must operate with some understanding of what is expected.

Customers value information.  They want business relations with clear information flows, minimal transaction costs and shared accountability for risks.  Ideally, you anticipate and fulfill their needs in a cost free way, without surprises and take care of surprises of all kinds: regulatory, supplier, customer, competitor, acts of god, etc.

Finally, customers value personal relationships.  This varies by culture, industry, firm and purchasing agent.  Business relations are rarely purely business relationships.  Personal connections, loyalties, favors, culture and understanding often matter.

Firms or business units should understand what their customers want.  They should identify minimal, expected and differentiated performance levels.  They should understand relative customer priorities.  This may require formal marketing research or trial policies or pricing exercises to determine real preferences.  This may require sales, marketing, engineering, production and finance to work together like never before.

A consensus one-page QSFVIP customer profile can help to shape decisions at the strategic and tactical levels.