Michelle winced as she watched her newest associate handle his first client intake. Michelle had liked the new hire and was glad that the firm had assigned him to her unit. But she didn’t like what she was seeing as the new associate plopped himself down behind his desk after giving a perfunctory greeting to the client, leaving the client standing at the door and wondering whether and where to sit. Michelle motioned the client to take a seat beside her across the desk from the new associate.
Users
Employers have customers, clients, patients, students, or others whom they serve. For job success, you may need, one way or another, to account for the satisfaction of those customers. If you have direct contact with your employer’s end users, then their satisfaction with your work and your treatment of them may be paramount to your job success. But even if you don’t have direct customer contact, your work may need to conform to customer expectations. Indeed, you may be halfway around the world from your employer’s customer but still need your work to meet that customer’s needs. Whether you design or make a product or configure or provide a service, your work likely has some kind of end user who has a set of needs and expectations. The better you understand, appreciate, and aim your work toward satisfying those needs and expectations, the more likely you are to find job success. Job success isn’t simply a matter of pleasing your employer. Your job success may depend more on pleasing your employer’s end users. Even if your employer isn’t particularly happy with you, if you are serving your employer’s end users especially well, you’ve probably got good job security.
Profiles
Do you know the profile or profiles of your employer’s end users? Having a clear profile of the customers, clients, patients, students, or others whom your work serves can help you refine that work into its best form in goods or services, and their fitting packaging, pricing, and delivery. If you don’t know your employer’s end users, not just what goods or services your employer is selling to them but also their real needs and preferences, then you may be missing substantial opportunities to improve your work. Thinking in terms of profiles can help you discern those needs and preferences. Are you serving mostly heads of households, men, women, the younger or the older, or the rich seeking luxury goods and services or the poor seeking staples? Are your employer’s end users seeking security, comfort, reassurance, healing, protection, inspiration, or adventure? What authors do they read and movies do they watch, from which they draw their yearnings and cultural references? And what is their goal in purchasing your employer’s goods or services? As much as you may like and benefit from your job, you’ll find it hard in the long run to respect your job if you don’t know and respect its customers or end users. Know whom you are ultimately serving.
Services
If your work is in a service sector, whether healthcare, law, social work, counseling, decorating, hospitality, cosmetology, or a hundred other service fields, you should especially know your clients. Again, you may not have direct contact with them, but if you do, then you should know how to greet and address them, make them feel comfortable and respected, share their needs and interests with you, and give you their trust and confidence. If you do not know at least those things, then you’re already in trouble. Seek training, find a mentor, research your client base, solicit feedback, and refer to customer survey responses, until you develop the interpersonal and perhaps the intercultural skills you need to properly serve your clients. If, instead, your role is behind the scenes, without client contact, then learn what you need about your client’s service expectations, needs, and preferences to do your secondary job accordingly. If you don’t have direct client contact, picture a typical client about whom you care deeply, and do your work as if for that client. Personalize your service work even if you don’t know the client because your work may reach and deeply affect a personal client.
Goods
If your work is instead in a field or sector that provides goods rather than services, you should still know the customers to whom your employer provides its goods. Of course, if you have direct contact with customers, in a sales-representative or customer-service role, you should know everything relevant about your customer’s needs and preferences. Customer knowledge is king in sales, so much so that companies regard as proprietary not just their customer lists but also their customer specifications databases. Every feature of the goods your employer is selling may be significant in one way or another to your employer’s customers, including things that you may not regard as material to the goods’ function, like the product’s name, packaging, smell, touch, feel, or color. Some sales representatives claim to know their customers so well that they could tell you what they eat and drink for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, where they buy their clothes, and the type of music to which they listen. Why? One may not know exactly where or how one discerns a customer preference, but the interest alone opens the mind and eyes.
Packaging
Astute workers know not only their customer preferences for goods and services but also for the packaging of those goods and services. Packaging here refers not just to the boxing or wrapping of goods but to the whole manner in which the provider presents the goods or services. Goods and services are often relatively similar or even substantially the same from one provider to another. Yet small differences in how those providers present the goods or services, including whether sold singly or in multiples, alone or with other goods and services, and with or without assurances and guarantees, can make big differences to customers or clients considering their purchase. Understand your employer’s need to package and present its goods and services sensitively, in the way that its customers or clients prefer or demand. Use your customer or client knowledge and insight to help your employer adjust and fit the packaging of its goods or services to the expectations of its customers or clients.
Pricing
Astute workers also understand pricing issues an employer faces when selling its goods or services. Workers generally know that customers and clients can be highly price sensitive. Yet customers can be price sensitive in more ways than many workers may expect. In many transactions, customers and clients don’t just look for the cheapest good or service. They instead look for price value. The so-thought more-expensive goods or services may by their better qualities provide significantly greater value, whether in their duration, use, effectiveness, healthiness, taste, comfort, security, or other attributes. A low price may signal poor value to some buyers. Also, the context for pricing may be more important than the absolute price. The timing of price disclosure, whether immediately up front or later after appropriate value information, may also be critical to sales. Appreciate that the pricing of the goods or services that you are helping your employer produce is a much more subtle issue than simply high, low, or in between. Recognize the pricing issues your employer faces when working to attract and satisfy customers or clients, and accommodate and promote your employer’s interests in meeting those customer or client pricing needs and preferences.
Delivery
Astute workers also appreciate the goods or services delivery issues their employer faces when striving to attract and satisfy customers or clients. Nearly every organization faces delivery issues, no matter what the organization does. Schools deliver instruction, while restaurants deliver food and experiences. Laboratories deliver test results, while hotels deliver safe, comfortable, and private rest. Architects deliver planning services, while engineers deliver safe designs. Accountants deliver financial statements and assurances, while physicians deliver healing, preventative, or comforting medical care. Nearly every business or nonprofit has delivery issues, whether they think deeply about them or not. Delivery issues include where to deliver, when to deliver, what to deliver, and how to deliver. The location of a goods or services provider, the speed with which the provider delivers, the security and consistency of the delivery, and a dozen other factors can influence customer or client attraction and satisfaction. Once again, your sensitivity to your employer’s delivery issues, and your ability to address and resolve those issues consistently, efficiently, and at times boldly and creatively, can influence your job success.
Rainmaking
Your ability to satisfy and please your employer’s customers or clients can result in your attracting new customers or clients for your employer to serve. In many business or professional operations, one set of owners or employees does the customer or client marketing and recruiting, while another set of employees serves those customers or clients. In other operations, employees may both recruit and serve customers or clients. Doctors, lawyers, counselors, designers, decorators, event planners, builders, contractors, barbers, and a host of other professionals can both provide the service and attract clients to the service, in what some firms call rainmaking. Firms employing those professionals can heavily value rainmakers, increasing their job security, compensation, resources, standing, and opportunities. If you are so good at serving your employer’s customers or clients that you regularly attract new customers or clients, building your own customer or client base, you can become a significantly more valuable employee to your employer, with significantly greater compensation and job security. Don’t overlook rainmaking opportunities. Identify, adopt, and deploy the best rainmaking practices in your field and role. Find out from mentors and research how to go about recruiting your own customers or clients for your benefit and the benefit of your employer.
Respect
Ultimately, the way to please your employer’s customers or clients is to respect and value them. Customers and clients enable your employer to compensate you for your employment. They pay your freight. Without them, you’d be out of a job. Your work should show eagerness to meet their needs. The owner or owners of your employer company, and likely the company’s executives and managers, care deeply about the company’s customers or clients, at least enough to promote customer or client devotion and return. Your employer’s representatives want you to care, too. One of the quickest ways to get demoted, passed over for promotion, or fired is to disrespect your employer’s customers or clients. Mistreat a key customer or client, losing that customer or client for your employer, and you’ll likely pay the consequences. But do your job so well that you gain more customers, clients, and sales for your employer, and you’ll find the job success you want and may need.
Reflection
Create a profile of your work’s typical end user, as detailed as you can make it. Let your profile’s features reflect the common material attributes of the customers or clients whom your work serves. Once you have that profile in mind, see if you need to adjust your work to better suit that profile’s attributes. Can you think of customers or clients whom you served especially well or poorly? What aspect of your work made the difference in each case? Can you help your employer package your work in a way more suited to customer or client preferences? Are you aware of the price and pricing features your employer charges for goods or services, and how your work influences or supports those features? What can you do to show your pricing knowledge and price sensitivity to your supervisor? Can you help your employer with goods or services delivery issues? Do you have any prospect for rainmaking within your employment role? If so, investigate steps you could take to try your rainmaking skill.
Key Points
For job success, your work needs to satisfy your employer’s end users.
To fit your work to your employer’s end users, know their profile.
Your contact with users should assure them of your skill and respect.
Services and goods should fit user needs and meet user expectations.
How you present goods and services should work well for users.
Pricing of goods and services should meet user reach and expectation.
Delivery of goods and services should be on time and accessible.
Your ability to recruit new users may fuel your job success.
Above all, your work should show respect and appreciation for users.