Customer Satisfaction 1 — Identifying the Customer

Who Is Your Customer? The Washing Machine "Identify your customer" sounds like one of those statements that is technically correct and practically useless. The user is the customer — everyone knows that, and management knows it best. But the real world is more complicated than that equation. An office worker in the city buys a washing machine for his parents in the countryside. The person paying — the son — wants the machine to reduce his parents' physical labour, at a fair price. The people using it — the parents — want it simple, so they don't have to think too hard, and comfortable enough to make daily life easier. And the small child in the house may treat the machine as a great hiding place; there is no shortage of tragic cases of children climbing into washing machines. The payer, the user, and the person who could be hurt are all "customers", and their core needs are completely different. The son cares about value for money. The parents care about ease of use. Safety — preventing a child from climbing in — will not be raised by either the buyer or the user. Only when the designer asks the...