Stimulus Package for Your Business<br>Take Stock of Communications with Your Clients and Customers
By Suzanne Bates
In this economy, how well are you and your team communicating with the people who are the lifeblood of your business? What issues do you need to address now, so you can move forward more rapidly as the economy recovers?
It's time to take stock of your communication with customers. Consider this an audit of communications practices inside and outside your organization. How well do you gather data, what do you do with it, and how can you use this intelligence to connect with and provide value to your clients and customers.
I want to emphasize the audit is not with your customers, but a review with your own team, to mine the intelligence you already have about customer relationships. In this process you sit down with your team to evaluate what you already know and what to do about it.
When sitting down with your team, it's important to lay the groundwork for a candid conversation. You need unbiased, complete information, so you can accurately assess current communications and come up with a plan. Let everyone know that it's okay to be candid. You want them to be real. Every observation will be reported factually and respected by others. Urge the group to lose their egos, suspend judgment about others statements, encourage people to say what is not usually said, and then, agree on action steps.
If you have already conducted customer surveys, ask everyone to review them in advance, even if they are not completely up to date. You may find that the information you gathered previously has been forgotten and is still relevant. If you do not have customer surveys ask everyone on your team to come in with two stories: a story of a customer success, and one of failure.
1st Team Meeting
Call a team meeting and review the data. Tell the stories.
- What lessons came out of the successes?
- What lessons came out of the failures?
- Write down these observations, transcribe and distribute to the team.
2nd Team Meeting
- Now that we've had time to think about these stories, what are the takeaways?
- What are the most important action steps?
- What issues need to be addressed immediately?
- What policies and processes do you need to institute for the future?
3rd Team Meeting
- How good are we at gathering our customer feedback?
- How good are we at evaluating what we learn from customer data?
- How are we using it to improve our service and customer relationships?
4th Team Meeting
- What pockets of clients and customers need special attention?
- How do we need to train or retrain employees to handle customer issues?
- On a scale of 1-10 where are we, and where do we want to be in 6 months?
- What is our roadmap to getting there?