Why a good customer view is so essential

If you know who your customers are, you can develop your services and products in a focused way and set priorities more easily.

That way, you get satisfied customers and better results.

With a good customer picture, I mean that you know who you are working for, who ultimately pays for your work and who benefits from it.

Who are your customers?

These might be paying clients, patients in the hospital or pupils at school. It could also be that you are doing work that enables your colleagues to help the final customer, patient or pupil. It is important that you are aware of for whom your work is intended and that you and your colleagues have the same perception of this. Do you recognise yourself in any of these examples?

“My wife and I both work in ICT. She has her own web design company and I work as a software developer for a large insurance company. The other day she asked me who my customer was and I didn’t know the answer to that. She did, of course. She has direct contact with her clients, who pay for her work. After some thought, my answer was: the business owners who commission me. When I discussed this with my colleagues, it turned out that there were different customer views. This immediately explained why we so often struggle to find common priorities. We have now identified together who our customer is and that makes working a lot more relaxed.”

“I work with great pleasure as a teacher in secondary education. If someone were to ask me for whom I do this, I would immediately say: the pupils. Recently there was quite a discussion about this in the staff room. A few colleagues were mainly guided by the inspection: meet all the requirements to get good evaluations as a school. That led to different choices and different priorities, without us knowing it. We discussed the differences and came to a common view. This did mean that a number of colleagues had to adjust their priorities.”

“I work in a shoe shop and for me it is clear who my customers are: the people who buy shoes. My partner works in healthcare and for him, that question is more difficult to answer: is it the patients, is it the insurer, is it the government? For him, it is clear: the patient always comes first, but he sometimes gets the feeling that his managers think differently, given the priorities they set. He will bring this up at the next team meeting.”

Do you know whether your customer image is correct?

The LEANmeter gives insight in how Lean you are already working. You see your strong points and get advice for improvement, individually and as a team.
Complete the LEANmeter and get the right impulse, it only takes 5 minutes of your time.