I am the Customer!

I was reminded, forcefully, of this lesson last week. It is easy to forget, when you’re in the throes of starting or even running an entrepreneurial operation, that your business is someone else’s customer.

Our original banking relationship was with one of the northeast’s largest well known banks. Every six months we were training another new assistant vice president in our business model, our client base and our services … unnecessarily consuming time and critical resources. When the fourth manager refused to consider a much needed increase in our accounts receivable based line of credit, we started shopping for a new bank. We were courted by several local and regional banks that competed for our business. Twenty years later, we’re still working with the top contender and have only had to “retrain” one manager.

I found myself thinking about that lesson again when a regional landlord neglected to pay the power company and we lost connectivity to our primary servers, including the one hosting this blog. When the power was restored, there was still damage to sensitive electronic equipment that had to be repaired and we’re still working with backup email service (slow but steady, sigh).

We’re routinely asked to provide past performance references to our commercial and government clients. Certainly, as we look for a new home for this equipment, references about the property owner/manager’s fiscal responsibility will be quite high on our evaluation checklist … or we’ll look for a property where we have the direct relationship with the utility companies!

An added benefit of this experience was the urge to review our own customer service and support processes. We verified that our customers don’t get lost in the babble of voice mail or messaging systems – like the ones where the directions are so confusing that it takes ten minutes to connect with a real human and by then you’ve almost forgotten why you placed to call. We ensured that calls were being transferred to someone who could actually help the caller. We took a look at how generic emails and requests for information were processed. We never want our customers feeling that angry inability to fix the darn problem.

Maybe all of us need to re-learn this lesson periodically so we entrepreneurs can be more proactive about our “customer-ness”. Often times we’re so busy running our businesses, providing services for our own customers that we neglect the fact we are another company’s client and a part of their revenue stream. From time to time we have to wear the customer hat to address these issues that impact our business’s ability to support our customers. Switching mental modes from providing a service, to requesting one is not always easy. Our entrepreneurial ways don’t always fit with our service providers’ business models. But, remembering that you are the customer can be ultimately rewarding for your business.