Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8

Seeing Your Business through Your Customers' Eyes

In This Chapter

• Realizing the value of your customers
• Understanding what makes your customers happy
• Developing a strong business model that brings value to your customers

The best part 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. Seeing your business through your customers' eyes is one of the best ways to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your organization.

When you neglect your customers, you tend to assume that you know them, what they want, and that they'll continue to buy from you. Businesspeople come up with various reasons to neglect their customers (intentionally or not), such as the following:

• Customer feedback takes too much time.
• Doing customer research is too expensive.
• I'm scared to hear what my customers really think.
• I don't have time to implement customer recommendations.
• Our sales are up, so customers must be happy.

In this chapter, you discover some easy ways to get past these excuses to uncover your current customers' needs and wants as well as create customers for a lifetime. By looking at your operations through your existing customers' perspectives, you can conduct more business with them. And armed with this information, you can make strategic decisions that raise your worth in the eyes of those customers who're most valuable.