The holiday season provides us with an excellent opportunity to take stock of our lives, and to appreciate all of the wonderful gifts we've received. I'm not just referring to gifts that you can buy on the Internet, such as dual-zone heated mattress pads or LED neck ties with built in WiFi detectors. I'm referring to gifts such as loved ones: family, friends, and (sure, why not) even pets. I'm also referring to gifts like good health, good jobs, and of course, good wine (I myself enjoy almost any decent 1997 vintage — as long as it is red, Californian, and sourced exclusively from grapes of the To-Kalon vineyard). While we all probably agree that our lives are truly rich with blessings, I doubt many people know the true value of the blessings in their lives (i.e., how much those blessings would sell for on the open market like eBay or Yahoo Auctions.) While it might be relatively straight forward for a company to determine its assets and liabilities, how does a person go about calculating the depreciation of their parents, or accounting for goodwill of intangible assets like a mother-in-law? So I decided to give it a try. I made a list of my most-prized assets and possessions and put them up for auction on the Internet to see what the blessings in my life were worth in hard cash. Here’s the list:
- Framed “Perfect Attendance” certificate issued by Maplewood Elementary school, second grade.
- Signed 8 X 10 glossy photograph of the complete cast of the 1980's television series "The Dukes of Hazard."
- 15 inch, "Rambo-style" hunting/survival knife circa 1985, complete with liquid-filled compass (though broken and no longer "liquid-filled"), waterproof matches, fishing line and hook, and snakebite kit (only used once).
- Collection of friends and family members in various conditions and ages (most still in good shape.)
After an intense five-day eBay auction in which three different bidders (two of whom I suspect were my parents) battled it out, the winning bidder took home the complete lot of items for $17.50 USD, plus shipping and handling. Cleary I was devastated as I had always assumed that the treasures of my childhood were priceless, or would fetch millions of dollars from some private collector — perhaps an oil-rich Sheik or Sultan, or a Las Vegas casino looking to attract tourists. Luckily for me, the winning bidder was indeed my mother, and all of my prized possessions were saved.
However, the experience got me thinking. As companies, we often tend over-value our products and services. We produce "things" and offer "stuff" that may be indeed useful to some people — but that may also get shelved in a closet by other people. The products that we sell obviously have a price tag — often a very large price tag — but, our products are NOT our most valuable assets. Our most valuable assets are the relationships that we have with our customers. Too often, when we take inventory of our successes as companies we look mostly at metrics like sales revenue, stock price growth, and peer-group market-share gain. While these indicators tell us how much money we’ve made, how much our investors made, and how much money we took from competitors, they don't directly tell us about the health of our relationships with our customers.
If we want to improve our customer relationships, we have to work at them — like any other relationship. In many cases, the advice that relationship coaches and therapists give for improving personal relationships can be applied equally to customer relationships. Ok, so perhaps "never go to bed angry" is not quite so relevant, but advice like "practice open communication" and "set aside time for working on the relationship" is highly applicable. For example, if 100% of our time is fully budgeted to non-value added tasks such as filling out bathroom-break request forms, cut-and-pasting from one spreadsheet to another, and changing traffic light icons from green to red and back again, that leaves no time for working on our customer relationships. Every person in the company should have dedicated "customer time" set aside for things such as reading customer presentations and case studies, responding to customer emails and trouble tickets, speaking with customers on the telephone, and yes even visiting customers in person.
This year let’s all make a resolution to spend time each day — even just ten to thirty minutes — working on ways to improve our customer relationships (assuming of course that we didn't auction off our customers on eBay, or give them away as Christmas presents.)
Comments