I wanted to share an exercise with you that we have been having our clients do. It first originated because I had a client come to me and say, “We don’t seem to be as connected with our customers anymore. We’re having some turnover with them and losing them to our competition.”
When they asked me what I thought they should do, I told them to ask themselves the following questions:
- Do you know what your customer really wants or needs from you?
- What do they expect from you?
- What is their customer experience when they purchase your product or service?
When he thought those questions over, his response was that he didn’t really know what they wanted or needed from him anymore. He admitted he’d been out of touch because he was doing so many other things in the business like creating new products and services. These were exciting things, but meanwhile he’d forgotten what the customer wanted and missed a lot of opportunities because of it.
My suggestion was for him to take a day (and I made him put it on his calendar right then) to go “be your own customer” for a day in his business. I encouraged him to see the process from the customer’s viewpoint and then come back and talk to me about what he experienced.
I told him that he needed to interact with his employees the way a customer would. Then take a good look at where the gaps were between what he thought they needed and what they really wanted or needed. Then make a shift or correction in his business accordingly.
So here’s my suggestion if you are finding yourself in the same situation in your business:
- Take a day and mark it on your calendar.
- Turn off your owner mindset.
- Take the owner hat off.
- Be a customer.
- Buy your product.
- Experience your service.
- Eat your food.
- Do the whole 10 yards.
- Then go back and look at what you’ve experienced.
- Pivot and make the necessary corrections.
I guarantee you are going to find some gold nuggets in this exercise and have some aha moments. You will then be able to shift and actually deliver more of what the customer really wants.
That’s a win for you, it’s a win for them, and everybody is better off!
Reach out and schedule a free consultation if you’d like to talk more about this.