Ethical Values

Are we deluding ourselves by thinking we understand our customers' needs?

'ACE' (Leading Edge Management Consultancy Limited) stands for an Audit of Customer Expectations. ACE identifies for you what your customers expect from your company and how they perceive you compared with your competitors. It is structured to focus on what is really important to your customers. It identifies the factors that are critical to a company's success and then explores them in an interactive way. It also measures how accurately staff understands the customers' expectations.

Identifying 'moments of truth' creates the platform on which you can build a customer focus programmed within your organization and put in performance measures against specific 'moments of truth'. Then you need to set new performance targets.

Another benefit is that you can benchmark your performance against your competitors which can be a very powerful way of identifying sources of improvement. It also identifies companies outside the industry that your customers think perform well. It is invaluable to analyse these companies' strengths in areas like their management structure, cost base, IT investment, market specialisms, and ways of doing things to get some really useful market knowledge on which to base future decisions.

Each audit package is company specific and can be carried out again at a later date to see what progress has been made with developing customer focus.

Case Studies - Benchmarking customer service

The project:

This company is a manufacturer of products which are used by the building trade, and sold either directly to the user or through specialist distributors and DIY stores. To complicate matters one of the products is sold under a different brand name to the users from that through distributors.

The