Voice of the Customer - Do small businesses care more about their customers

[Aaron Lupo]

I have a question and would like to see what other people think. I am taking a class in Costing of Quality and the discussion question came up that asks:

Do small business care more about their customers and have a better handle on the VOC (Voice of the Customer) for the products or services they offer?

These are my thoughts:

I would agree since I have worked for very large companies such as XXXX who really didn't care about the customer and XXX who seemed to bend over backwards for the customer. I think small companies have to since it is more critical to their survival and they usually have a large percentage of their business with one customer, not the best practice in the world but it happens. Where as the big companies have many more customers and yes they will cater more to the larger "more important" customer they tend to forget the little guy.

Just curious to see what others think.

Aaron

 

[mike101338]

I dont think you can lump small versus large companies into the same groupings for this question. IMO, the more important variable is how hand on the top executives/owners are of the company. The larger the ivory tower, the poorer the customer service.

 

[qualitygoddess - 2010]

Interesting thread!

I am leaning toward the ivory tower argument. I have mostly worked for and with small companies, and I think 99.9% of them would walk on fire for their customers. I think larger companies are better equipped with personnel, programs, etc. to do a very effective job at being the absolute best for their customers. If they don't use what they have, then the customer suffers, and shame on them!

 

[H. Majhenich]

H. Majhenich

I used to work for a large company - 200 plus people, and when customers related to the brass what they wanted, it filtered through a good 10 people before it reached the operators. You ever play 'telephone' when you were a child? Everyone twists what they heard or drops something from it until the end result can be totally different from the original.
Now I work for a small company - around 50 people, and when customers express their desires, we ALL know what they want. When customers come in here, they are welcome to talk to everyone (was discouraged strongly at last job) and there is no mistaking what exactly they want and meant. Operators are happy, quality is happy, customers are happy. Win-win.

 

[Jen Kirley]

I also support the Ivory Tower theory.

My research shows that small businesses are aware they are closer to the edge than big ones. They are given to more sensitivity to their customers because their livelihoods are based on fewer numbers; losing customers can hit a small company faster than a large one, especially if there's not a ready line of credit available and not a lot of capital assets. I observed a small business bend over backwards to serve one major customer that had been rejected by all the other area machine shops. The strategy seems to have worked, this company is successful and has been growing.

The customer-sensitive thinking can also change among the same people. I saw an example where growth invited an interesting loss of customer sensitivity. A newspaper of my acquaintance has a web site that was drawing enough "hits" to bring in advertising. Then a member of the IT staff made a proposal to charge membership fees for customers to view the newspaper online. No math was done to project the revenue curves and the break-even points of gained revenue among the strictly loyal and those unwilling to pay. (This means, they didn't think to hire someone like yours truly to run their ROI numbers.)

How the readers howled! The scheme has not succeeded--many readers were lost, along with that advertising money. Does the newspaper's management notice? Not apparently. Their strategic model has become one of growth through aquisitions of smaller neighborhood papers.

 

[Caster]

Not neccessarily

Do small business care more about their customers and have a better handle on the VOC (Voice of the Customer) for the products or services they offer? Aaron

Aaron, a good question. My answer - no way to tell. I think it depends
on the corporate culture and the attitude of the boss.

My wife makes rubber stamps, it is a one person internet business. There are thousands of competitors. The smallest of the small. We are absolutely stunned every time we get an e-mail that says something like "you are the only company to reply to my request for quote". It happens all the time! So small can be bad.

Here in Canada we just went through a "politically driven agenda" to amalgamate all our small towns and cities into single large entities...surprise, the one big entity is not as efficient as the many small ones were. And the local touch was lost. So big can be bad.

So it depends I guess.

 

[Marc]

Old thread - "Blast from the Past" - Do you have anything to add to "This Old Thread" on this fine Sunday morning?

 

[TPMB4]

We're a small company that has to listen to customers. We only listen as far as it is in our company's interests. Bottom line is more of an issue I think.

 

[Mikael]

There can be lots of scenarious, why do you want to settle this, it makes no sense!?
There are millions of different businesses in different markeds, positions and types of products.

I have seen large companies with closed eyes and ears and some with open, the same for small companies.
You can have two salesmen or purchasers within the same company that handle the VOC very different.

BTW depending on how you define VOC might not be good, e.g. what if the customer is wrong...

Once I considered to write a book about the sensitive quality company/sc, the expression I prefer, but I guess I will never have the time, lol.

 

[Wes Bucey]

I deal with companies large and small. Anecdotally, from a relatively small sample, there is no difference in customer-centricity ranked by size. What DOES seem to make a difference is the efficiency of the bureaucracy in fashioning a satisfactory response to a customer query. Lots of small businessmen are clueless when it comes to making an "exception" to their normal course of business in favor of customer satisfaction.

I recall going into a small one-owner delicatessen and ordering a corned beef sandwich "with horseradish, please." The owner behind the counter said, "I don't like horseradish, so I don't offer it."
My response was. "Forget it!" and I went elsewhere. As Paul Harvey famously said, "The rest of the story" is that I passed by the store a couple of months later to see it vacant, with a "FOR RENT" sign in the window.

So, I have no facts as to why the place went out of business, but suspicions of owner stupidity top my list.

The owner could have said almost anything except that it was HIS prejudice and I might have accepted some substitute. His inflexibility lost me as a customer.


Whoever heard of a delicatessen offering corned beef that did NOT have horseradish?