My first blog post was about having a positive attitude towards things, and I’m going to deal with this subject again here. We start a new year and we have 365 brand new days to make a really astonishing impact on our world. For those of you who conduct business around the clock it also means that you have 365 days to make your customers even happier with your products and/or services. For some of you there is only Monday to Friday when you provide a service for your customers, in which case you have 260 days to accomplish the same effect.
Are we not experiencing hard times right now, many problems with the world economy and a failing customer base? Yes, if you truly believe that, then that is the fact. However, if you decide not to think in those terms, then it is not so! What you believe within your business largely decides your outcome. Certainly, some customers most definately will stop buying, but I’m sure that with a positive attitude you will also be able to find new markets or maybe also tailor your products and services so that they fit a new customer’s needs.
I also feel sure that if you state that you are unable to succeed, then that is what will come to be .
Think about it this way: you have more than enough money in your business to satisfy your customers! That is because you have so much money in your business, that you can allow yourself to spend 35-45% of it on wasted activities. My experiences from assessing businesses and also from other surveys show that the waste percentage can be as high as half the budget of a business!
If there are troublesome times now and in the future, make sure that those times do not affect you, but rather, your competitors. Trouble can strike, if for example, you don’t take the opportunity to shape up and to turn around those waste percentages of yours into something that will increase the value to the customer, which in turn will encourage them to buy  from you instead of  someone else. This will mean that you have more customers than ever, even if the market is failing. Those who will have the problem are those who do nothing about their wastage.
If you belong to a public sector business you can find ways to make the money that the customers have paid you in advance, last longer. Yes it is a fact, they have already paid you to provide a service to them. Do not abuse their trust and money, because if you do you will be out of business, there will be alternative means of providing your service, maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the future.
I would say that the single largest effect on your effectiveness is how you as an organization see your customers. The second largest is how you organize yourself so that you give your customers the value that they seek. Those two are intertwined, because when you set your focus on delivering an outstanding value to your customers, it is easier to mould yourself in the flow that gives the customer that value. Whilst you are organized in a linear configuration there is clear evidence to suggest that you do not see the satisfaction of your customers as your first mission. It, however shows that you have an organization with heritage from Taylor to form resources – humans – that could not read, not write and were not educated. That form of organization focuses on organizing people so they can be a part of the big machine in a scaled production. That environment is long gone and you have to think in a different way to meet the challenges of now and the future – today and tomorrow.
Meeting the demands of the customer by organizing yourself according to the flow of value-creation is what we term a ‘process’. Start to identify what  your purpose in the business is and then divide it into sub-parts. Look at it from the customers’ perspective, because the process equals the customer experience.
How can you improve your service to the customers?
To your Excellence!
Matts
PS.
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