10 Questions to identify how important customers are in your company

Apple, Amazon, USAA, Virgin Atlantic, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, John Lewis,  – great companies whose success is built on how they have established enduring, mutually beneficial relationships with customers.

How close is your company to their standards?  Answering a few simple questions might provide some clues:

1.       What gets talked about most in your company?  Is it customers?  Or is it sales, profit, costs or something else?

2.        Is your company primarily focused on selling to new customers or deepening and extend the relationship with existing ones?

3.       Does the governance process include impact on customers as one of its key assessment criteria?  When decisions are communicated internally is it explained how impact on customers was taken into consideration?

4.       Ignoring the reasons why policies and procedures have evolved as they have, if you were starting afresh and wanted to make it easy for customers to do business with you, would you design them differently?

5.       Are your policies and procedures designed to block / prevent the activity of the small number of dishonest customers or the majority who don’t?

6.       Are customers involved in the design of policies and / or procedures before they are launched?

7.       Does your company constantly seek customer feedback?  And then does it receive it graciously and use it to change the way things get done?

8.       If a customer complains, how are they viewed?  What is the primary aim of the complaints process?

9.       If a business area is a reflection of its leader(s), do leaders in your company think they ‘know better’ than customers?

10.   If you were a customer or your company (and if you’re not, why not?), would you trust and want to do business with it?

How does your company stack up?

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