How easy is it for your "customers" to do business with you?

A caveat

When I speak about "customers" I am referring to anyone you have to deal with on a professional level - be it face-to-face, by email, telephone, via your website or any other form of communication method you choose.

So - teachers - your "customers" are your students, parents, fellow teachers, suppliers and parent teacher associations etc
Students - your customers are - your fellow students, any group you belong to, teachers, if you work then your work colleagues and the people you serve are your "customers" in the classic sense.
Small business owners, large business owners, employees - we all have customers.

So - how easy is it for your "customers" to do business with you?

Have you looked at what you do from their perspective? It's quite an interesting exercise and one that I would recommend you do on a regular basis. Basically you need to become your own customer.

1. Go through the public side of your website - can you order your own products? How hard / easy was it?

2. Have you telephoned your business - what message did you receive? Was the receptionist bored / bubbly? Was your own voice message bored / boring / informative?

3. If you had to receive your own letter / envelope? Would you know who had sent it to you? Would you know who the business was? Is it the image you are trying to portray to your customer base?

4. When you see people face-to-face - what do they see? This is always a good test - go and stand in front of a full length mirror - if you were in the process of hiring someone - would you hire the person in front of you?

5. Are you courteous when people knock on your door? Do you smile, do you frown, are you short-tempered? And you can tell what you sound like - if you are stressed, hurried, angry, sad, happy - it shows in your actions, your tone of voice and the choice of words you use. I see it all the time - sales people who don't like talking to people, never smile and don't make eye contact. Teachers who hate kids - well what on earth are you teaching for?

Authors and the movie business have depicted this in many different ways of course - Scrooge, The Super etc etc ....

Doctors who become patients and have to "suffer" the same treatment and method of support as the people they had been treating vow they will change the way they work AFTER going through the process they had subjected their patients to.

6. What do you see when you look at your social networking profiles? Are you giving mixed messages? It's no good telling people you are a professional if your pictures show you falling over because you were drunk or posting inappropriate status updates.

And of course when you see an area that you know needs to be worked on, then for goodness sake make the changes, or change jobs - you are not set in stone - you can change things.

Make it easy for customers to do business with you.