I just finished reading the latest "Street Smarts" column in the April, 2009 issue of Inc. magazine. (I tried to link to it but it's not available on line yet). Norm Brodsky is the columnist. He's a veteran entrepreneur and author of "The Knack."
In this particular column he talks about one of his early businesses. He says this, "…one of the most important lessons I've learned in business: When in doubt, go to your customers. They will tell you what they want and lead you to solutions you'd never come up with on your own."
Great advice. I happen to like this take much better than the cliched advice of the 90's "the customer is always right." While that might be true most of the time, anyone who's been in business (or ministry) for any length of time can give countless examples of when the customer was not right. I definitely like this better…the customer might not always be right, but you better be listening to him/her.
You should be giving your customer ways to feed back to you on how you're doing. Customer surveys, online reviews or ratings, "exit polling" (calling customers after the "sale" to evaluate how you did) all help you ask your customers "how're we doing?"
Of course it's one thing to ask and quite another to actually listen to the answer. It's easy to fall into the trap of explaining away all their negative reviews ("Hey it was raining that week. What were we supposed to do about the mud?") while allowing the positive reviews to give you a skewed picture of how good you're doing. No matter how bad the criticism, there's always some truth and you'll never be disappointed when you follow the truth.
Set up ways for you and your staff to ask and listen to customers on a regular basis. Never assume that you can make the best decisions apart from their input. When you think about it, it really makes a lot of sense. You are in ministry to serve the needs of the people. To make decisions without their input would be short-sighted at best…disastrous at worst.
My column in the next InSite issue deals with this well. Very critical stuff. Thanks!
Meant to say “deals with this AS well”. Who am I to say say how well?