Category Archives: Customer focus

Design Your Organization to Serve Customers Well

Posted on June 26, 2024 by John Hunter

Quality is a Journey to Excellence is a 2 day management seminar that Bill Hunter (my father) recorded in 1985 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The embedded clip shows the second section of a the seminar discussing customers and how to organize your systems to serve customers well. See part one of the seminar, and the full seminar. Some aspects of managing an organization well are quite challenging. But some aspects really are not and yet we still often fail to … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Deming, Management, webcast | Tagged Bill Hunter, Customer focus, Deming, management, productivity, quality, webcast | 2 Comments

Learning from Customers

Posted on March 2, 2021 by John Hunter

Don’t make it hard for customers to be heard. Provide training and tools to employees to document customers voices. Train employees to learn as much as possible from customers. Value the time employees spend listening to customers and learning from them. Most customers won’t speak up, those that do speak up provide valuable insight. Don’t waste what they offer. Create a management system focused on continual improvement that is engaged in seeking out customer feedback and continually improving the value … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management | Tagged critical thinking, culture, Customer focus, customer service, Data, feedback, learning | 1 Comment

Quality of the Entire Customer Experience

Posted on March 14, 2018 by John Hunter

There is a difference in the way many organizations are managed today and managing with an understanding of your organization as a system aligned toward customer focused continual improvement. The ability to create great customer experiences is much easier with a management system based on customer focused continual improvement principles than one without. Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Psychology | Tagged ASQ Influential Voices, Customer focus, management, Psychology, Quality tools, respect for people, Systems thinking, usability

Looking in the Mirror at Customer Focus

Posted on September 5, 2017 by John Hunter

Most organizations say they are focused on meeting and exceeding customer needs. But, as a customer, this often isn’t what I experience. Delighting customers is critical to long term business success. Satisfied customers will remain your customers until they see the opportunity for something that might be better or is cheaper. Delighted customers are loyal and much more likely to remain customers. Delighting customers is often about paying attention to the small details. Paying close attention to customer’s jobs to … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Innovation, Management, Systems thinking | Tagged culture, Customer focus, customer service, Innovation, Japan, management, strategy | 1 Comment

Cater to Customers Desires to Achieve Customer Delight

Posted on January 10, 2017 by John Hunter

Customer delight requires understanding your customers needs and desires. Often even your customers don’t understand these well. Businesses that have a deep appreciation for what their customers, and potential customers, desire and that create systems to deliver solutions that delight those customers benefit greatly from that effort. To build a sustainable enterprise you must provide value customers will appreciate. Your customers do not have one unified set of desires. Some customers may want as good an experience as is possible … Continue reading →

Posted in Competition, Customer focus, Management, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged Customer focus, customer service, management system, organization as a system, Psychology, Systems thinking | 3 Comments

Continually Improving Using a Focus on Delighting Customers

Posted on December 1, 2016 by John Hunter

ASQ asked the ASQ influential voices to respond to this question: What is the best way to ensure quality and customer integration grow together? When I first got involved in the quality field that name (quality) seemed to vague for me. And different people and organizations seemed to have vastly different meanings in mind for efforts they all grouped under the heading of quality. What I came up with to capture what I was interested in was customer focused continuous … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged ASQ Influential Voices, continual improvement, Customer focus, management system, organization as a system | 1 Comment

Add Constraints to Processes Carefully

Posted on November 23, 2016 by John Hunter

Take great care in adding constraints to processes to avoid doing so needlessly. Online you will frequently find forms that have required fields that needn’t be. Certainly if you were designing with focus on what is best for customers those requirements rarely make sense. Occasionally a required field is a sensible constraint on an online form but so often they add unnecessary constraints. I frequently find those forms even requiring a false answer since a response is required and none … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, IT, Software Development | Tagged bad customer service, Customer focus, customer service, IT, mistake-proofing, process thinking, tips, usability

Unintended Consequences

Posted on June 29, 2016 by John Hunter

Using data to understand your processes and improve them is very useful. But using data often results in unintended consequences. If you don’t have a good understanding on the pressures collecting data will bring to bear on the system you can create pressure for results that damage the delivery of value to customers. In this example there are requirements to take action if certain conditions are present. In this case, if the airplane is pushed back from the gate for … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Management, Process improvement, Systems thinking | Tagged airlines, Customer focus, Data, Systems thinking | 1 Comment

Support Theatre

Posted on June 21, 2016 by John Hunter

Support theatre provides the appearance of supporting customers when in fact it is just treating customers poorly based on a management system that disrespects customers. It is a similar idea to security theatre that has become so popular for government in the USA for the last 10 years. Dilbert does a good job of illustrating “support theatre” in this webcast: I have had the exact experience Dilbert does of tech support refusing to think about the actual symptoms of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Fun, Management | Tagged bad customer service, commentary, customer service | 2 Comments

Functional Websites are Normally Far Superior to Apps

Posted on April 23, 2016 by John Hunter

An email to I just sent to Uber I understand the regular Uber app not having a functional website. Uber Eats not having a functional website is super lame. It strikes me similar to Walmart 15 years ago telling people “we only have stores go to them, we just use the internet for advertising our stores.” Today for Uber: we only have apps, “we only use the web for advertising our apps.” Both you and Walmart want to use a … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Innovation, IT, Software Development | Tagged commentary, Customer focus, Innovation, internet, IT, Software Development | 1 Comment

Human Proof Design

Posted on October 6, 2015 by John Hunter

Human proof design is design that prevents people from successful using the item. It is similar to mistake proofing except instead of prevent mistakes it prevents people from using it. When you see human proof design you will often see signs to tell people how to use the device that has been human proofed. Common instances of this are hotels that have shower designs so opaque they need instructions on how to use a device most people have no problem … Continue reading →

Posted in Creativity, Customer focus | Tagged bad usability, Customer focus, design, Management Articles, mistake-proofing, usability, user experience

The Value of Professional Conferences. Also Why Has There Been So Little Innovation?

Posted on April 28, 2015 by John Hunter

In the most recent ASQ Influential Voices post, Julia McIntosh takes a look at the costs and benefits of professionals attending conferences. I still remember being in high school and George Box talking about the primary value of conferences was talking to colleagues in the hallway. This seemed very odd to me, as it seemed that the reason for going to a conference was to learn from the talks. I also didn’t really understand the value in catching up with … Continue reading →

Posted in Career, Customer focus, Education | Tagged ASQ Influential Voices, Career, conference, Creativity, Customer focus, learning, management history, Process improvement, process thinking, technology | 5 Comments

Transforming a Management System – A Case Study From the Madison Wisconsin Police Department

Posted on March 10, 2015 by John Hunter

This post in an excerpt from The Quality Leadership Workbook for Police by Chief David Couper and Captain Sabine Lobitz (buy via Amazon). Transformational Steps A Case Study Madison, Wisconsin (1981-1993) Step 1: Educate and inform everyone in the organization about the vision, the goals, and Quality Leadership. This step must be passionately led by the top leader. Begin discussion with top management team and train them. Discuss and ask employees; get feedback from them. Share feedback with the chief … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Deming, Management, Respect, Statistics | Tagged Books, case study, change, continual improvement, Customer focus, Data, Deming, leadership, Madison, management, organization as a system, Public Sector, respect for people, TQM, transformation | 6 Comments

Good Startup Ideas from Startup Weekend JB (Malaysia)

Posted on November 27, 2014 by John Hunter

I like all these startup ideas from Startup Weekend JB (Malaysia). I can’t figure out how to comment on their blog (I am guessing Tumbler just eliminates commenting?), so I started this post – and ended up adding much more than I planned on putting in a comment. All of these ideas are not very technically challenging and pretty much versions of these businesses are already successful around the globe. But creating great user experiences (in apps or on web … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Innovation, IT | Tagged Asia, business, Customer focus, customer service, Innovation, IT, management, Software Development, startup | 1 Comment

Don’t Ignore Customer Complaints

Posted on November 20, 2014 by John Hunter

I find Paul Graham’s ideas very useful. I disagree with his recent tweet though. Update: See note at bottom of the post – Paul tweeted that his original tweet was wrong. Base your assessment of the merit of an idea on the actual merit of the idea, not the category you place the person in that is expressing the idea. His reply tweet addresses the problem with the first one in a very specific case. But you have “bugs” that … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus | Tagged continual improvement, Customer focus, customer service, evidence based management, feedback, gemba, organization as a system, Paul Graham | 2 Comments

Out of Touch Executives Damage Companies: Go to the Gemba

Posted on August 20, 2014 by John Hunter

When your customer service organization is universally recognized as horrible adding sales requirements to customer service representatives jobs is a really bad practice. Sadly it isn’t at all surprising to learn of management doing just that at our largest companies. Within a system where cash and corruption buys freedom from market forces (see below for more details) such practices can continue. Such customer hostile practices shouldn’t continue. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue. And even though the company’s cash has … Continue reading →

Posted in Customer focus, Data, Management, Psychology, Systems thinking | Tagged bad management, business, commentary, curiouscat, Customer focus, customer service, Economics, executives, gemba, Google, government, internet, leadership, management, Psychology, regulation, respect for people, sales, targets