Do you manage your business from the buyer’s point of view?

IF YOU DO, then some of The No Boundary Manager strategies will look familiar, but with a different perspective. The focus is on boundaries. These boundaries can either encourage or stop buyers from buying from you. The challenge is to remove the negative boundaries so that you can create and maintain satisfied customers. Ask yourself these four questions:

1. What are your Moments of Truth? They are not only the physical products or services themselves, but every interaction between your customers and your company. What parts of your organization do customers access? Are those contact points the ones you support and train? What really happens during your Moments of Truth?

2. What boundaries do your Moments of Truth illuminate? During these Moments of Truth, the boundaries, good or bad, are revealed. "Do they facilitate buying, or do they inhibit potential customers from buying? Do existing customers experience delight, or do they find reasons to become dissatisfied? What type of boundaries do you have in your products and services, your advertisements and marketing programs, your sales and service processes, your Help Desk and administrative support, and your business processes and procedures? How can they be changed to make buying from you easier and being your customer more satisfying?

3. What attention is given to the consequences of your boundaries? What is the value of changing a boundary or the cost of not doing so? Do you navigate your business according to your actual Moments of Truth and their boundaries with their inherent consequences? What will be the consequences of a change in your processes? If you rebuilt your organization from the outside in, from the point of view of your customer, what would that organization look like, and what would be the consequences?

4. What are your feedback mechanisms? Traditional, GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles)-based accounting information does a good job of reporting the past, but what do you rely on to predict the future? What kind of feedback do you rely on to tell you, in real time, about the effects of changes in the way you handle your Moments of Truth, changes in your boundaries? What kind of nontraditional feedback mechanism do you have in place? Are you aggressive in applying advanced information technology?

     Become a No Boundary Manager and learn to tear down the walls between you and your customers. Become a business that people want to deal with, to buy from, to use, and to recommend to their friends and colleagues. What value do consumers find in your products and services and business? Discover what value means to your customers—often, value is not just about price, for example. It probably means things such as ease of access to your business, your risk management policies when something goes wrong, payment policies, even whether your customers like your people or not.

      Build a No Boundary business.