F S O W Consulting Helping Business see itself through its Customers Eyes to improve Profitability

Bottom line, loyal customers are profitable customers because they trust you. Trust provided to you by your customer gives you an opportunity to "increase wallet share" or grow your sale by simply recommending or providing your opinion. Compare a sale like this to a company trying to inform, educate, market, and sell to a new consumer that has no knowledge of its business. Now reflect on the selling cost associated with attracting new customers. There are nominal selling costs, if any, when selling to a loyal customer hence each sale of this nature is more profitable.

Across industry there are many studies and statistics on the absorbent costs of acquiring and retaining customers. The focus of this article is helping you see your business through your customer's eyes to improve profitability not on industry statistics.

If you believe no one knows your business like you do then as they say "the buck stops here" and YOU have an OBLIGATION to provide thought leadership for your services and products. Obligation may be a strong statement and most businesses view their obligations only as it relates to the quality of their products, the delivery of their services, the obligations they have to their shareholders, employees, and/or community. But taking it one step further, "you" have an obligation to your customer to provide "Thought Leadership" for your business. Consulting firms do not corner the market on "thought leadership", we use the term because F.S.O.W. Consulting and others understand the long-term value of providing it, and we enjoy the profitability of converting a customer base to a loyal customer base. Expand your view of "obligation" to include "thought leadership" while effectively providing it and you will convert your customer base to a loyal customer base improving your overall profitability.

How do you do this? Simply take yourself out of your corner office and "be the customer". Not just any customer, a new customer. Now go through the entire process of their experience from beginning to end.

Assisting you in this effort, ask yourself questions like if I didn't know about my company what would I do or where would I go to find my company. Then once found, participate in your business as the new consumer. Again, depending on industry, call and make an appointment or visit your physical place of business. Documenting your experience and the processes to identify if you should apply "thought leadership" in that area and if so what would it be and what are the desired outcomes of providing it in that point of your customer's experience of your business.

Let's take you through an example of how a doctor would do this for their practice.

Find My Practice: I have an ailment in which my practice specializes. Pull a representative selection of new customer files and review the folders. Most practices today have new patient forms that include a standard "How did you hear about us" field.

(Note: F.S.O.W. Consulting specializes in data mining patient data increasing practice revenue and profitability, helping doctors localize their business though web technologies to attract new local patients, and more. If you are a physician and are looking for ways to improve your profit or increase revenue please visit http://www.fsowconsulting.com)

Reviewing each new patient folder summarize the responses and weight them:

Referral Doctor -82%
Referral Patient- 7%
Directory Assistance - 3%
Phone Book - 4%
Internet- 1%
Other -3%

There is a tremendous amount of information gleaned from this simple chart. What do you see? What a consultant sees is that only 7% of patients are loyal to you and there is a 93% opportunity for customer loyalty conversions.

Now as a physician you most probably said wow 82% of my business is coming from my colleagues I'm doing great. I'm well established and my experience, reputation, and networking efforts are paying off. Keep up the good work.

Although it is true this is a very good referral rate, from a patient loyalty standpoint it means that 82% of these patients are coming to you because they trust the referring doctor. You have yet to win over the referred patient's trust.

Now get out of your comfort zone and select a patient that came to you from the Phone Book, becoming this patient as you continue through your process.

Ask yourself, does your ad provide "thought leadership", should it? "Let our Medicare specialists assist you Today", "We Provide Custom Fittings", "Convenient Parking". Whatever the case may be, the point is that your relationship with your new patient starts at the singular point of how they came upon your practice. Providing value added information is very different than listing your specialty, contact and location information.

Your phone book ad provides "thought leadership", your new patient is coming to you with a level of expectation from this ad and the new patient has selected you above your competition as a result. What expectations does your new patient have as a result of the ad? Reflect upon this question as you continue to "role-play". Ring the bell, tap on the closed receptionist window, sign-in. What sense do you get? Is this a pleasant experience and environment? Obviously this will be a pleasant experience because your staff knows you and the patients know you. You will most certainly not be required to tap on a closed frosted receptionist window or ring a bell and the patients in the waiting room will chat with you versus displaying their normal senses of frustration while enduring long waiting times.

The reality of this scenario is that a business cannot effectively perform the "new customer role-play" successfully and objectively unto itself. Each business already believes they are customer centric or place high standards in quality care or whatever their tag line, mission statement, or mantra may be. It is not about the business really, it is about a new customer's view of the business and if this business is sufficiently providing "thought leadership" at effective strategic points within the total process flow of the business for its products and services. Capturing data, documenting processes, mapping customer experiences to those processes, understanding data and its collection within each process and analyzing if the data, collection, and its use are optimized in ways that promote customer loyalty is how F.S.O.W. Consulting quantifies a new customer's experience and view of a business.

Across industry, F.S.O.W. Consulting helps businesses evaluate new customer experiences, documents the processes of the customer interaction with business processes and personnel and provides "thought leadership" injection recommendations. Helping business define, deliver, data mine results of the impact and the role "thought leadership" plays in converting a customer base to a loyal customer base to improve the profits of any business. F.S.O.W. Consulting Helping Business see itself through its Customer's Eyes to improve Profitability.