THE CUSTOMER — OUR REAL BOSSES!
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” — Sam Walton — Travis Biggert
Sam Walton was right, and as I ponder on his statement I can't help but wonder how many unicorns would have been created if those leaders, managers, and the staff would intentionally listen to their customers. The hallmark of a failed enterprise is the lack of the ability, tools, or the need to listen to their customers
The story of Blackberry epitomizes how it is easy for unicorns to fall if they fail to listen to their customers. BlackBerry was founded in 1984 as Research In Motion by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. Years later they came to own about 20% of the world mobile phone market and about 50% of the phone market in the United States. With the creation of the iconic blackberry messenger, there was a unique catch that persuaded company CEOs to subscribe to the blackberry Midas touch! For a while, they ruled the Mobile global market, however, they fell. Whenever people are at the top, most of the times complacency creeps in, we stop listening, we stop innovating, and when the cut-throat competition that is akin to the business world catches up with us then we start to play catchup. The blackberry management was caught sleeping and when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, the chicken had come home to roost! The iPhone had a bigger screen, multiple interactive features and continued to innovate as they have done over the years.
At Lloyd Constellations, we listen to our customers, we endeavor to serve them better and become proactive to their needs. This is what the story of Blackberry teaches each one of us. As Anna Segova perfectly puts it “Don’t try to tell the customer what he wants. If you want to be smart, be smart in the shower. Then get out, go to work and serve the customer!” At the heart of our mission is to continue innovating so that we can improve our competitive advantage and offer a superior value proposition to our customers.
As we continue to provide 360-degrees I.T Consultancy in Kenya — building software, Mobile Apps, Web applications, and Digital media, and growth hacking services, over and again we have heard and seen the struggle these SMEs face when they want to make better decisions for their businesses. Even though they have websites, apps, and so on, how do they make better day-to-day decisions? After months of meeting and discussions with our customers on what we can do to help them make better business decisions, we have come up with a solution. Our Team has built Biz Mkononi to help our customers make better decisions. Biz Mkononi is an AI-powered insight platform that provides decision-making tools, solutions, and analytics to the small and medium enterprises’ economies and their participants in Kenya. The aim is to leverage on machine learning to help our customers to have better insights from their data and ultimately make the right decisions.
The Biz mkononi platform aggregates normalize and models complex data to illuminate the ways in which small and medium enterprises in Kenya can be more resilient and robust through harnessing the power of technology. With the dearth of Data not only in Africa but also globally, Biz Mkononi is integrating potentially over 10,000 data sets and processing north of 100 trillion data points in weeks so as to offer the best insights to our customers. Our platform Biz Mkononi has been co-created together with our customers through design thinking and an empathy approach. It Is easy to use and helps businesses to manage simple items such as stock, employees, revenue and uses the data that is produced to give AI-Powered insights into complex issues such as Revenue projections, Churn rate risks, How Climate change can affect their business through modeling, Trends in the market and at the same time helping these enterprises get a 360-degree analysis of their customers. Talk to us today and we will set you up on this amazing platform.
As we continue to celebrate our customers during this #Customerservice week, at Lloyd Constellations Consulting Ltd, we are excited to listen to you — our esteemed customers, to continuously innovate and offer better products.
If you don't remember anything from this blog, just remember “BLACKBERRY”!
