Focus on customers
When it comes to focusing on every customer, Sinisgalli says it all comes down to one thing: frequent contact.
“We have a number of different prospective opportunities to touch our customers,” Sinisgalli says. “It’s important you take advantage of those opportunities. Too often, companies will suggest that the only time they hear from a company is when they’re sending them a bill. You certainly want to avoid that. … The more frequent and the more open the environment for customer feedback, the better.”
You need to have multiple ways to get feedback, and you can start with customer calls. Whenever customers call for help, make sure they not only have their question answered, but that they also rank their experience. Manhattan sends customers who interacted with the company in some way a link to an online survey where they rate the experience on a scale of 1 to 5 in a few keys areas, such as timeliness, quality and professionalism.
“That instant feedback is very valuable,” he says. “It gives you a firsthand feel for what customers think, and if there is an issue, before it becomes a big issue, you have an opportunity to respond to it.”
If the ranking is less than a 4, then a manager follows up with that customer by calling so he or she can better understand the situation and what needed to happen to improve the customer’s experience.
“The management will penetrate to better understand what didn’t go as well as the customer would have liked under ideal circumstances and then work with the people who provided the support to improve that going forward,” Sinisgalli says.
Last year, Manhattan averaged a 4.6 on these calls, so Sinisgalli is satisfied in his team’s ability to solve customer problems.
Besides taking customer calls, he also has found product councils as a way to get feedback from customers to help dictate the direction Manhattan should go.
“Developing a product council that has real power is a good way to encourage your customers to come forward with their thoughts,” he says.
Manhattan has a small council of about 12 customers for each of its products.
“Any more than that, it’s too hard, and any less than that, you don’t have enough input, but with a dozen on each council, it works out well,” Sinisgalli says.
Each smaller council has a president, and those council presidents — about 20 in all — participate in larger, overall product council meetings three to four times a year.
Lastly, provide a large-scale event for your customers to meet with you each year. Manhattan has an annual meeting with its customers. The last one brought 1,000 people to Orlando to gain more insight into the marketplace and get detailed information about Manhattan’s solutions and products. They have a couple of larger sessions for everyone and then smaller breakout sessions organized by products so people can ask questions and provide thoughts about how the products can better meet their needs. These sessions also help them gauge how prevalent issues are.
“Is this one customer request or were the majority of people in the audience making a similar request?” Sinisgalli says. “It’s a pretty easy way to assess the majority needs of the customer base in these meetings.”
The user conference is also helpful because when customers get around other people that they’re not necessarily doing business with, they’re more willing to speak up and bounce feedback off of each other.
“The most important thing to do is provide an environment that customers are comfortable sharing direct feedback,” Sinisgalli says. “A customer conference is a great mechanism when you have a dozen or more customers using the same product sitting around the table, they’ll tend to get more and more comfortable and feed off each other with suggestions of where to help move our products, so create that environment.”
