Strategic Planning For Dummies®

Chapter 8. Seeing Your Business Through Your Customers' Eyes

In This Chapter

• Determining your most valuable customers and why they're your customers

• Selecting customer‐focus measurements for your strategic plan

• Evaluating the key activities that provide value to your customers

• Pinpointing specific goals to kick your value up a notch

The best thing about your business are 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 various reasons to neglect their customers (intentionally or not):

• It takes too much time.

• It's too expensive to do customer research.

• You're scared to hear what your customers really think.

• You don't have time to implement customer recommendations.

• Your 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 creating customers for a lifetime. Odds are you could be conducting more business with your existing customers by looking at your operations through their perspectives. Armed with this information, you can make strategic decisions that raise your worth in the ...