What does it mean to be truly customer focused in a technology company?  Perhaps you have product managers regularly in the field meeting with customers.  Perhaps your sales people are all schooled up on 'consultative selling' and the art of investigative interviewing for the purpose of fleshing out your customer's problems. Perhaps you have an exceptionally responsive technical support function.  These are certainly great characteristics in any technology company - or any company for that matter.  But what about your R&D department or otherwise, your software engineering department; how well do they know your customers?  What about your marketing communications team; how well do they know your customers, really?

Every technology company is in the same business - the business of solving problems - solving their customer's problems.  This is not a trivial exercise and as a result, it warrants repeating: your company's business is to solve your customer's problems. Therefore, it stands to reason that you should know your customers.  I don't mean your sales people should know your customers or your product managers should know your customers.  I mean, everyone in your company should know and understand your customers and moreover, should know and understand the nature of the problems you are trying to solve for them.   You've heard these phrases before - singing from the same song sheet, pulling in the same direction, etc.    Is it true in your organization?  Is the company aligned around the challenge of customer problem solving?

I challenge you to walk over to your R&D department and informally chat with the engineers or the developers.  Ask them about your customers.  Ask them to describe a day in the life of your customers.  Ask them what specific customer problem the feature they are currently coding is designed to solve.  If a single developer is unable to answer these kinds of questions then I suggest you have some work to do.

In a technology company, being customer focused through and through means that your customers and your customer's problems are well understood not only by the sales people and the product managers, but also by your marketing and R&D teams as well.  Every member of every team in these departments should be well versed in your customer's world and more specifically in the problems you're solving.  This customer centricity becomes a common thread binding together teams from every department and facilitating constructive problem solving dialogue whether related to a product positioning message in the marketing department or a new feature in the R&D department. And guess what?  Solving problems is a benefit and customer's buy benefits so the more focused your organization is on problem solving, the more likely you are to hit the mark communicating your value to your customers.

And what about innovation?  Put your hand up if you think the probability of stimulating innovation in your R&D department increases the more 'everyone' understands your customers. Hopefully your hand is up.  Knowing your customers is one of the most important fundamentals you can rally around as an organization, and it will pay dividends and impact results.  Here are a few tips to get you On the Right Track.

• In your requirements and specifications documentation, be disciplined in defining the problems that are being addressed with each feature.  Add a column to your features and benefits table entitled 'problem' to ensure every feature is linked to a customer problem.
  
• Make a point of ensuring sales, marketing, product management, support, and R&D are all trained on customer problems in the context of features and benefits.
• Set up a weekly 'lunch & learn' to discuss your customer's problems and bring together a cross functional group for the exercise.
• When assigning project tasks, ensure the people to whom you're assigning them are well informed regarding the customer problem that is associated with the task. Hopefully, this will be obvious in the documentation anyway, but nevertheless, take care in nurturing this customer centricity with R&D as much as you would with sales.
• Add a section to your employee orientation that provides significant detail about your customers and the nature of the problems your company is solving for your customers.

We're in the business of solving problems, so it stands to reason that we should take care in making sure the organization is aligned around this critical objective.