Chapter 4 — Customers
Three things to look at
The Customers segment of the Strategy Map breaks down into three areas of work:
- Foreseeing problems — heading them off before they become customer crises.
- Identifying usefully profitable customers — knowing who to keep, who to upscale, and who to fire.
- Delivering profitable work — handled mainly inside Process tasks, but informed by what is true in the Customer segment.
"Perception is reality"
A formative story for Felix: a long-running client was increasingly unhappy. When the team finally sat down to find out why, the team was delivering £19 of new sales for every £1 the client spent — and the client had no idea, because nobody had told them. The client could only see costs going up. The lesson Felix draws is that customer dissatisfaction is almost always a failure to communicate value.
"Perception is reality."
Client Satisfaction Scores (CSS)
CSS is Felix's preferred customer-side measure. The chapter is sharp about the failure modes most companies fall into:
- Not asking customers at all (because they are scared of the answer).
- Asking only the satisfied customers (sampling bias).
- Designing surveys that elicit polite, gameable responses.
- Worst: gaming the score to fool yourself, your investors, or your future customers.
A good CSS is short, asked predictably to the right contacts, and used as a forward signal.
Foreseeing problems
The chapter argues that most customer crises are visible months in advance — usually through the absence of normal good signs (re-briefs, casual chat, payment speed) rather than the presence of explicit complaints. The Roadmap should include a process for surfacing weak signals to client-services leads, and a structural feedback loop that pulls those signals into the GLT's monthly review.
Identifying profitable customers
Time tracking is non-negotiable. Without it the company cannot know whether a customer is profitable. Once timesheets are in, a monthly KPI report should compare hours-on-account vs revenue-billed, and the GLT should review the most and least profitable customers each month. Felix is unsentimental about firing customers who are structurally unprofitable, where the cost of trying to fix them will outweigh the upside.
Roadmap example
The chapter shows how the Customer goal "happy customers" cascades:
- Customer satisfaction survey (Customer task) → top scorers are asked for referrals (a Sales & Marketing task).
- Identify unprofitable customers (Customer task) → implement timesheet tracking and the monthly KPI report (a Process task).
- 90% client-services staff retention → training for the account management team (a People task).