Main Idea
How open are you to new business? Are you really open? Is it a pain to deal with your organization? Are you making policies based on you looking out to the world? How often do you make policies based on the world looking into your organization?
Expansion of Idea
I recently had to open some trust bank accounts for two clients at three different banks in order to spread the deposits. Do you want to guess the differences in times? The quickest time was about 20 minutes. The longest was 75 minutes which made me late for a meeting. The middle one was 30 minutes. I had never dealt with the one that only took 20 minutes. They were very efficient and I moved in and out easily. The middle bank was very professional, but I think their computer program was not as user friendly. The bank that took 75 minutes had an inexperienced person opening the accounts and we had to redo the paperwork a couple of times. She was very nice and apologized for being slow. The problem is that I did not have unlimited amounts of time. Other people in the bank could have helped the situation. This created a barrier in my mind about using this bank in the future. Even though this bank has had great service in the past, I will think twice about opening a new account there.
Are there barriers that you have created in your business? Your job is to remove the barriers and make it easy for customers to do business with you. These barriers could be time as noted above or hours of operation. It could be credit or shipping policies. It could be that people have to learn a secret handshake.
In my office one of the barriers that we have to constantly work on is the fact that because we understand accounting and taxes, we assume clients understand our language. Each client has a different level of understanding. When we are not communicating properly with our clients, it is very frustrating for our clients. We need to always monitor their level of understanding and then fill in the gaps. Sometimes we do that well and other times we don’t. The point is you have to constantly look for ways to make it easy to do business with you.
Action Items
Talk to your team about the barriers.
Talk to your customers about any barriers.
Identify one barrier that you and your team are going to work on.