Customer focus vs customer focus

“There is no customer focus” - says one famous and startling character of Runet. And deep down, any manager agrees with this, smiling at clients with a smiley emoticon in an e-mail.

But what if this is a half-truth?
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What if instead of an obvious, but non-existent customer focus, there is an implicit, but very much existing customer focus?

Customers and business owners, please under the cat.

Business as a mathematical model

Business can be represented in the form of a certain mathematical or dynamic system. Such a system does not have a constant growth; instead, a number of stable states and transitions between them prevail. Everyone knows the problems of growth of Internet companies, web studios: the company is rapidly growing to a certain size, then slides down a bit and freezes in stability. Or, for example, a retail point, to which, by discarding seasonal deviations, X buyers come in the reporting period, and the whole business generates a Y turn.

A business has many parameters and their changes take the business out of the point of stability. Parameters are in constant weak fluctuations, but any significant changes, whether it is a withdrawal to a new level or, on the contrary, demise, knock the business out of the point of stability. A business goes through a certain phase transition and falls into another stability.

Obviously, the main goal of any business is money. Clients usually bring money, so for most of the business the number of clients plays an important role. But the number of customers is just one of the parameters in the system. The web studio serves 10 new clients per month. It can serve and 15, but in the trawl, or 5, but impoverished. Web studio can be upgraded, hire people, change business processes, and the studio will learn how to handle 30 clients per month. But there is usually no intermediate stable point for 20 clients.

So, the number of customers as a parameter is subject to fluctuations that do not have significant changes to the business. This means that there is a certain threshold or percentage of clients from which a business can simply refuse, while losses will be indistinguishable from errors. The percentage is small, but it exists.

The web studio can hire a special person who will catch one random new client per month and say something like “hello, at first glance you are a very nice person, but you know what, fuck it, we are with you will not work. " The client will ask in amazement: “But why ???”, they will answer “No reason” and close the door.
Seriously, rejecting a touch of sarcasm, you can allow yourself, ceteris paribus, to abandon a small number of clients and continue to exist perfectly well.

Man-mathematical dualism of business

Everything is clear with business as a mathematical model. But we all know that people are important. Any company consists of people, and always, always, it is people who merge everything. But sometimes there are great. And if you are familiar with the already not very fashionable methodologies, the phrases “people are more important than the process” prick their ears.

Let us set aside a large corporate segment, where people are no longer working, but a large human mass, a chaotic meta-mind. And consider the SMB, in which top managers and business owners somewhere nearby.

Any person making decisions in SMB has a number of moral values, a certain concept of business ethics. For him, clients are not exactly a parameter of the system, but also people. Which can be oh what assaults in life or just to be carriers of completely different views (different religions, belonging to different minorities, radical political convictions, well, to whom I am telling, you yourself understand everything perfectly).

In such a situation, the employee may decide (LP, of course) that he simply does not want to have anything to do with such a client. And abandon it without explanation. As you may have guessed, the business does not lose anything.

Subject of the transaction

Business receives money from the client. And as you know, 100 rubles from client “A” are no different from 100 rubles to client “B”, from 100 rubles in an envelope for a birthday or 100 rubles won in a casino.

The client receives a certain product or service, which is always something different from other similar products and services. And sometimes they are very different. Moreover, in some cases, for example, in the service sector, the receipt of the service is one-time in nature, and the provision is massive.

Those. for a client, getting a service is a straight story, and for a business of such stories every day is a dime a dozen.
Thus, the business receives non-unique, super-liquid money, which one in one can be obtained somewhere else. And the client receives a unique service or product.

Customer focus

Any modern business must be customer-oriented, otherwise everything. Grooming and nurture their customers. Wikipedia says that client-orientation is a strategic approach to the development of an enterprise, aimed at increasing its competitiveness and increasing profitability by improving the quality of service and meeting customer needs.

In simpler words, these are simply loyalty measures that are nothing more than parameters of a large “business” system.

Customer orientation

I have never met such a term, the client is always right. A performer must be tense, include loyalty and appease.

But what if it is not?



And what's more, everything says the opposite.

A business can easily reject, for example, one client, for no reason at all, and get exactly the same money from another client. The client should get tired and go look for new performers, while he will not be able to get one-to-one of the same service, he will get something a little, but something else.

Shouldn't customers stop showing off, demand loyalty and just start paying?