Including Customers In Your Control Regime

By Mark R. Meckler, Ph.D. October 27, 2015

Actively include customers in your control regime.
It’s a top 5 most important element of the whole control system.

Who are your customer groups?

Your customer groups are subsets of others that consume your services, buy your products, or directly benefit from your products, services or activities in other ways. A brewpub/tasting room has a bunch of customer groups: In store guests, distributors, beer/ale drinkers at other restaurants, pubs and bars, retail customers that buy in package stores, and even the local neighborhood(s) that benefits from the presence of your operations.

Some groups are more critical to the success of your business than others. You may have noted this when you started the business, planning to appeal to one particular customer group or another. For a typical brewery in the United States, distributors are your main customer, and your most important customer group to understand.

Some of the groups are large enough that it is important to divide them into subgroups. For example, in store guests might be divided into bar area guests and service table area guests. Or, there may be significant differences between in-store guests with children and in-store guests without children. You may have craft beer optimized distributors and clear beer optimized distributors. Understanding them is hard work. You must balance some competing demands, such as what their needs are, what value proposition you intend to offer them, and understanding how well your operation is actually delivering that value to them.

I remind the operations manager two important things

Firstly, remember that you should be trying to create the most elegant control system possible. That means controlling just what needs to be controlled very well in a minimized way. Spend as much time removing non-critical controls and unnecessary duplication as you do creating the control system draft.

Secondly, remember that control goes both ways – from management and from the business’s users/stakeholders. This is called reciprocity. In a sense, we have to allow customers to control us as much as they are letting us control them. While others should not control your ethics, your dream or your purpose, customer groups can and should be offered real influence in many other aspects of your business. Let customers have lots of power in dictating what you produce, how you serve and how you operate. In exchange they will value your product, be loyal, and pay you money in exchange for it. The key here is developing flexibility to adjust your offerings so that they appeal to each different customer group without trying to do too many different things. Of course you can’t please everyone, but you do have to please the different customer you are targeting and depending upon to support your business!

How to include customers in your regime

I suggest using boundary controls, diagnostic and interactive control systems all together. For a summary of these controls, click here.

  1. Boundary Controls. Firstly, on the boundary control side, clearly communicate to your customers what behaviors and product characteristics and service characteristics they should never be receiving. Recall, boundary controls represent the boundaries of service that can never be crossed. Give them easy communication channels to report any variance at all (print on your labels, on your napkins, anywhere obvious and ubiquitous). Even the small things. When they report something, reward them with a heartfelt thank you and a valuable coupon. Make it exceedingly simple for customers to report, and simple for the general manager to receive the feedback.
  2. Interactive Controls. From the interactive control side, you have the difficult work of discovering what matters most to customers, and what matters least to them, and then dividing these up by customer group. This can be one of the most difficult to learn, and most important bits of market knowledge.
  1. Meet with both existing customers and non-customers. Interact. Ask questions, listen. Note the answers.
  2. Give them some questions to fill out and report back on later.
  3. Collect the data.
  4. Analyze the data.
  5. Set Standards for operations
  6. Develop and implement systems
  7. Measure it all again, on a regular basis (perhaps bi-monthly at first, then bi-annually).
  8. To deal with variance between your set standards and the observed data of what each customer group is hoping for and your product/service standards, either adjust the standards or adjust the production/service systems to achieve your goals.

What kinds of things shall we ask the members of our customer groups to get their help with controls?

Ask them to tell you about things that they like. Things that people really hope to get from your pub or brewery. Ask them about things that they do not like. Things that people really hope no to get from your business. Analyze the data and determine the main factors and their relative strengths.  Next, do histograms of each question. Look at the visual graph of the distribution around that question. Decide what you think it means. If there is a tall skinny map of the data in front of you, that’s good. Look at that first. Taller means strong effect and skinny means “mostly agreed upon by everyone” (a low standard deviation).

  1. Diagnostic Controls.
    1. Look at the difference between the standard you set the first time, and these new data. There will almost always be a difference. This is diagnostic control data. You are now faced with having to adjust your operations systems, or adjust your standards, or both.
    2. Track your sales data to see if the groups you are targeting and attracting are actually valuing your product. The most frequent cause of business failure is not actually offering enough value for the various target markets that is necessary for them to be glad to pay for it. See the white paper on Value Proposition Control for details.

For example, ask 100 potential customers to note what they like. You provide the categories that they will check, and you can refine those category questions over time.  You say check what: makes you feel happy; is fun; Worries me; Makes me not worry about the price too much. They write a sentence about a preference, then check the category it falls most closely into.  Also collect data from your accounting information system (cash registers, etc.) that detail what people buy, mostly and least, of your offerings.

Categories from potential next customers and other outsiders should include things like:

  1. I like to eat this;
  2. I like to eat like this;
  3. I love the taste of this;
  4. I do not worry muchly about the price of this.
  5. I like to go there;
  6. I join this kind of community of customers, of clients, of believers, or what have you.
  7. It’s totally worth it

Your data analysis will give you factors that you hope really do represent the like and the dislikes, and the force of each from the point of view of potential next customers that walk in your door. Normally, you find out that there is a wide spread of what matters to people on most items. But, you do see a pretty narrow spread about the price that people are comfortable with. Making food at a cost that keeps your price in that smaller spread is now your goal. You will have also learned the relative importance of a few factors.

Report your findings. You may find that people’s tastes when it comes to food and beverage are plainer than you expected. So for the data of what people like, expect similarities across people from within a regional culture. 

Listen to the power-point slides on the culture code of beer, and you will realize that these are the very foods in the craft beer movement that craft beer consumers want. But this varies geographically, among subcultures and between cultures.  In almost every cultural pocket of humans on the planet there are lists of “best friend foods” and “dads’ foods.” Where do you find those lists? Why, they are the menus of the hundreds of the long histories worth of brew pubs and grills houses in that region of the world. Just go look and see, or better yet, move there and learn what they love eat and drink when they are hosting each other.