Know thy customer

The best thing about your business is your customers. You have a group of people who like what you sell, find your product or service valuable, and give you money in exchange for a bundle of benefits. Because you probably have some operating history, you can mine your company for information about why customers buy from you and what motivates them to do business with you instead of someone else. I call this seeing your business through your customers' eyes.

Seeing your business through your customers' eyes is one of the best ways to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your organization. Business owners and CEOs often get so bogged down in the day-to-day operations of running a business, that it is easy to forget the purpose of the business the customer. Putting out operational fires, managing employees, and fixing technology problems often lead organizations to put

customers on the back burner.

When this happens, you tend to assume that you know your customers, what they want, and that they'll continue to buy from you. To ensure your success, you've got to incorporate their perspective into your decision making. How do you do that? By listening and asking! And not just once a year, but

continuously. Sounds simple, right? Well, here are a few of the most common excuses businesspeople come up with:

* It takes too much time.

* It's too expensive to do customer research.

* You're scared to hear what your customers really think.

* You don't have time to implement any of their recommendations.

* Your sales are up.

At the end of the day, we are all in business because our customers allow us to be. If that is the case, it's time to get past these excuses. Spend some time "walking" in your customers' shoes.

The first place to start is to dig into what your customers are really, truly buying. If you ask almost any company what they sell and then turn around and survey their customers to ask what they buy, it is usually not the same thing. In fact, nine times out of 10, your customers will give you a different answer or express it in a different way.

Take Netflix, the online DVD rental service, for example. Employees might say they sell a service that allows customers to check out and return DVD rentals through the mail. Conversely, customers would say they are buying convenience. In order to see your business through the eyes of your most valuable customers, you have to understand what your customers are really buying from you. You have to think like your customers.

Thinking like your customers requires some research and data about your customers attitudes and behaviors. Here is what you need to know:

* Who buys?

* What do they buy?

* Why do they buy?

* When do they buy?

* How do they buy?

Answers to these questions can be found in information and feedback all around you. You can take the traditional route and obtain this information through a survey. But spending tons of money and months collecting customer feedback can be too overwhelming and cost prohibitive for many companies. Why not collect information during the normal course of business?

Consider Lexus, the luxury car manufacturer. Management requires that every employee, from the top to the bottom, interview 10 customers every month. By doing so, Lexus is creating a culture that puts customer information in the hands of every employee on a regular basis.

Here's a list of easy ways to obtain feedback from your customers without using a survey.

* At the point of purchase: There's no time like the present, ask at the moment when the transaction is taking place.

* Order forms and invoices: Include a comments box.

* Online: Add a "Tell us what you think" link on every page of your site, preferable in the header or footer.

* Sales reps: Set up an easy way for your reps to feed information back into your organization.

* Newsletters: If you send one out, include a question or two.

* Telephone: Make sure your recording tells customers how to give you feedback.

* Comment cards: Why not include a comment card inside your shipment?

* Support calls: Your technical and customer service reps hear tons of information from your customers. Set up a general system to collect the feedback these employees hear every day.

If you're looking for the bottom-line impact of obtaining customer feedback, consider a small toy retailer that sends out surveys to every customer after a recent store experience. In just five years, the company has grown from 10 stores to 90 $150 million in revenue. The owners attribute the growth largely to a consistent focus on gathering customer feedback.

Gathering feedback from a variety of sources results in an objective, comprehensive picture of who your customers are, what they want and value. However, collecting the information is only half of the equation. Ensure that everyone in the company knows what customers are thinking by sharing customer feedback through the organization. By doing so, everyone will start to make better, more informed decisions because they are looking at your business through your customers' eyes.

Erica Olsen (Erica@m3planning.com) is a principal of M3 Planning, a Reno-based strategic planning firm that works with growth-oriented organizations to develop and execute their strategies. Her company runs MyStrategicPlan.com, a web-based strategic planning system for small and medium businesses. She is also the author of the upcoming book Strategic Planning For Dummies.