Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (Part III)

During challenging times people tend to want to brush by the not so pretty issues, but the only way to make significant improvements is to look at yourself and your business in the mirror and unabashedly evaluate your situation. This is the third of a three part series looking at Focus, Products and Services, and Customer Analysis.

Customer analysis

If the only time your customer hears from you is when you are trying to sell something, I'm betting they are not returning your calls these days. Customer relationships are critical to lasting involvement. All organizations are facing a challenging environment and people prefer not to solve problems on their own. They want someone to partner with them and they want that person to be someone trusted and close. If you've developed those kind of working relationships them you want to capitalize on having that relationship and talk about the new year. The challenges that are ahead are best addressed with the two organizations working together to solve problems and each organization will be stronger as a result of this collaboration.

Because customer relationships are critical you need to ask the mirror, mirror on the wall about customer relationships.

How do our customers see us?

Begin by listing all of your customers in rank from most active to least active. Give yourself a scale to work from 1 representing we have a minimal relationship to 5 representing they are virtually a vertical extension of our organization. Once you've completed that analysis, using the same scale, list where you'd like that relationship to be. Not everyone is going to be a 5. In fact, some you might even want to be less because you can become too reliant on one customer. Make action plans according to the development you want with each customer.

I also suggest you offer some form of anonymous response customer survey with regular frequency to give them the opportunity for suggestions and honest feedback.
When you hold your business up for reflection in the mirror refrain from wanting to shatter the mirror. Chances are that mirror is in the form of a consultant or a managerial meeting retreat.

Chewing out the mirror and claiming it's an inaccurate reflection or getting so nuts as to want to shatter the mirror doesn't solve problems, doesn't make the issues go away. The only gain you get from breaking the mirror is 7 years bad luck and if you think your employees don't like walking on eggshells imagine how they are going to feel walking on broken glass.