The Hindu Business Line : Who is your real customer?

I don’t feel I am adding as much value as I could,” complained a colleague who is a software programmer. “Who do you think you work for?” I asked him, expecting the standard answers. He didn’t disappoint me, listing the name of the company first, followed by his boss’ name.

On the face of it the answers to my question seem pretty obvious, like the answers given above. But dig deeper and you’ll realise that these answers are only half-true.

How many of us really understand or rather make an effort to understand who we really work for? And that’s primarily the reason why many of us tend to feel the way my colleague felt — not being able to contribute as much value as we think we could. “What happens if you do not turn up for work one day?” I prodded my colleague further. “Well, my boss hates it when I do that,” he replied.

“Who else is affected?”

“That would be my client who yells at my boss whenever I take an off,” said my colleague. His client was the line manager of an investment bank, which had outsourced work to our company.

I then prodded him further on why that happened. “Actually, my line manager is responsible for a trading application which handles trades worth billions and even a small amount of down time of the application may cause the bank to lose billions,” said my colleague, now smiling brightly, getting what I was hinting at.

I call this process ‘knowing your customer — KYC,’ borrowing the term from the regulation which is so prevalent in the financial industry right now.

However, this version of KYC is about realising who the ultimate customer of your efforts is. Until and unless one makes an effort to dig deeper, traversing various levels of authority, management, companies and customers — finally ending up with the true customer — one cannot fathom the importance of one’s contributions.

“Is there more to it than just knowing my ultimate customer?” asked my colleague.

The KYC guidelines help in more than one way, I told him.

Identifying who is actually your audience is important in forming your solutions or responses. For instance, a presentation you make to a Chief Executive Officer would be very different from one you would make to his assistant. The amount of detail or the nature of information in the presentation would change according to the audience.

Your response would also change with the situation. So if it is the first meeting with a C-level executive, your response would be different from what it would be were it a follow-up meeting with the same executive.

Knowing your customer better also helps you manage your time appropriately. Instead of spending hours on what requires only minutes, you would be able to complete tasks quickly and also find more time for yourself as well as for taking up even greater responsibilities thereby maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

‘But, how do I do it?” asked my colleague . It’s really simple and more so if you make it a habit, I explained to him. “The omnipresent 80:20 rule works in this case as well.”

All that is needed is to spend at least 20 per cent of the time you’ve allocated for a task in trying to answer questions such as: Who is really going to benefit from the task? How is the task going to affect the end customer? What kind of response or message is the customer really expecting? What is the surrounding environment in light of which the response would be analysed?

Apart from these, do a bit of snooping around or dig deeper to form a profile of the customer, his expectations, his pain points and, more importantly, his needs.

(The writer, an alumnus of the S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, is a manager with a leading IT services provider in India.)

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