Helmut Kazmaier

Stimmt AG

Electrical engineering background. Seven years experience of User Centered Design and User Experience Design. Shifting focus to Customer Experience including all touch points of the customer experience chain.

Hidden Champions know (and serve) their customers better

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Posted on 2010-02-23

«Hidden Champions of the 21st Century» by Hermann Simon made quite an impression on me and I want to share some insights.

The book reveals success factors and strategies of companies that Simon calls Hidden Champions.

Hidden Champions comply with three criteria:

1. No.1, 2 or 3 in the world market or no.1 in Europe (Europe centric view here)
2. Total revenue less than 3 billion Euros
3. Little known in broad public

In short, very successful small to medium sized companies mostly specialised in a specific niche.

I don’t want go into all of the success factors, but point out one, that I found very interesting especially in contrast to very big enterprises: customer relation and understanding.

According to Simon Hidden Champions have a very close relation to their customers. In contrast to big enterprises the rate of employees with frequent client contact is five times higher. Also top management values direct client...

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Do you already tell your customers to go away?

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Posted on 2010-02-19

From personal observations and talking to customer facing employees:

Observation no. 1: Bad guys win.

It appears to be a good strategy for customers to be inconvenient (from a company’s perspective). Never accept anything that doesn’t satisfy your expectations, enforce your right, complain, be loud. Most companies will try to calm you down and give you what you want, in order to get rid of the problem. Companies trying to satisfy their customers is basically a good thing. Nobody would argue about that. But there is another side to the story.

Observation no. 2: Nice guys lose.

The quiet customers, those who maybe complain once, but will not really push it when things aren’t going their way, are usually worse off. They don’t “squeeze” as much service or value out of a company.

The lesson customers are taught is this: demand, be wild, push it to the limits. It often pays off. By giving in to this behaviour companies...

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