Focus on customers
In addition to making tough decisions and communicating with employees, Heyman has also had to focus on his customers.
“The most important thing is to understand your customers’ wants and needs really well and not spend time as an organization on things that really don’t matter to your customer and to, alternatively, bring a tremendous amount of energy to the things that do matter to your customers and can, especially in these times, drive improved profitability and revenue growth in their businesses,” he says. “It always starts with products that can do those types of things.”
Then there’s a second component to that.
“Once you have the products, have a model that you can sell and deliver and service those products to the customers,” Heyman says. “Those two things have to work together. A really good product without a strategy around selling and servicing those products won’t work, and, alternatively, if you have the best sales and service organization in the world but you don’t have the right products, you don’t have much to sell. Those two models have to work in sync with each other.”
But to be able to do either of these components effectively, you have to build strong customer services and relationships. He can’t get to all 100,000 of his smaller customers, but he can work with Radiant’s largest customers, who spend millions of dollars with him and have a large vested interest in the company’s success. While his employees are interacting with them every day, and that’s important, the executives also make focused efforts to reach out to them every six months through face-to-face meetings.
“We go through a very rigorous process of evaluating how we’re doing in different areas,” Heyman says. “That drives a set of actions amongst the team in the six months. If we’re talking in January as executives and agreeing these five things are critical to be working on, you can believe that the rest of the organization is going to be working on those before our July 1 meeting. It’s just the blocking and tackling of implementation plans like that around every single customer.”
He says you have to ask a lot of questions to really get to the heart of your customers’ issues. Heyman and his team ask about 40 different questions around things like their products, product road map, software quality, hardware quality and services quality. But then there’s one final question.
“We ask one question at the end, and that is, ‘How likely are you to recommend Radiant to a friend or colleague, on a scale of 1 to 10,’” he says.
He’s not happy with any score below a 9, so it sets a very high bar for the company’s customer service standards. When he gets lower scores, that’s where the other 40 questions help Heyman and his team realize why the score isn’t higher and helps them identify ways and areas to improve.
While these sessions were in place before the downturn, they’ve been critical to helping customers during the downturn, as well.
For example, many restaurants and retailers — Radiant’s primary customers — said they face issues of theft, so Radiant has focused on technologies to prevent theft and help them keep dollars inside their stores to increase profitability. They did similar things with helping them reduce costs and waste. And helping them earn more money makes them give a higher satisfaction score.
By focusing on his customers as well as making the tough decisions and communicating with employees, Heyman has successfully moved the company through the downturn. While revenue did drop slightly — from $301.6 million in 2008 to $287.5 million in 2009 — his 1,300 employees have rallied together to make the company stronger, and he foresees a bright 2010 and beyond.
“Our products are stronger, our customer satisfaction got stronger, we’re able to do raises, we’re making plans now to return the 401(k) match, and the product staple is super strong in terms of our ability now to add even more value to our customers,” Heyman says. “People now feel like the sacrifice was worth it and they’re playing on a winning team, and we’re now even better poised to capture the opportunities that were part of the company when the crisis began.”
How to reach: Radiant Systems Inc., (877) 794-7237 or www.radiantsystems.com
