Is your enterprise surviving without Customer Xperience Audit?

When you are clueless about results of financial audit, think of customer experience (CE) audit. Yes CE audits can bring out many of the causes of good or bad financial results. Unfortunately no companies engage in CE audits. 

When your company's EPS is dropping, it is not necessarily due to higher capital deployment or higher input cost, it can be because of your lower pricing capability, it can be because of higher ad/marketing cost, it can be because of higher customer turnover, it can be because of low per capita buying by existing customers, it can be because of your faulty customer services design & it can be because you are neither listening nor watching your customers.    

VOC & Journey Maps / Customer Mirror are some of the ways in which you can know about kind of customer experience your enterprise is delivering while dealing with your customers. Remember Mystery Shopping is not CE audit. Its is just a one component of CE audit. 

Financial performance is the result of all these activities company performs during the year. We are too keen to know the result & then analyse it superfluously without even thinking about CE. 

Its like focusing on exercise for weight loss results without focusing on diet. If you keep analyzing and changing your exercise without proper diet plan it is neither a right analysis nor it will give desired results even in future.

Our intake is critical for weight loss programme, exercise just support and supplements it. You can reduce weight with proper and timely diet without exercise but without diet discipline only with exercise weight loss is not possible and even if it is achieved it is not sustainable.

Likewise without focusing on customer experience part , financial results shall not be analysed & it can not remain sustainable. For long term sustainable financial results which every company desires, focus on CE is critical prerequisite for analysing the results. 

Therefore immediately after financial audit , companies must commence CE audits. Both put together is the right recipe for performance improvement initiatives. Without CE audits and knowing what kind of CE your company is delivering , all performance improvement initiatives will  be incomplete and won’t give the desired outcome. 

3 Idiots - 2 for Our Enterprises Too

Wishing all my readers & their family a very joyous , HAPPY and grand Diwali. 

Time to celebrate , enjoy  & introspect too. 

While watching movie 3 Idiots (i have lost count now , how many times i have watched this movie) last night , I could find new meaning and relate it to our professional and corporate life. We now have 3 Idiots for students to fall back upon while getting excessive pressures from professors and parents, but we also have pressure cooker kind of situation in our professional and corporate life also & post studies we spend our rest of the life working for corporations. What about that??

Like students life , Marks and Numbers rule corporate life too. Sales Targets and Bottom-line numbers. This unlike students life we have to under go along with our family responsibilities. Companies declare better out look and better targets quarter after quarter. Top and Bottom-line counts , that's all. 

What it takes to achieve the numbers is hardly of any significance. Environment awareness is spreading somewhat but what about human side of it ? Who care about employee happiness?? Superior and out of the way Customer Experience ?  Better vendor relationship ? better social responsibilities ? better environmental concerns? 

We measure sales , profit, eva , ebitda, eps, roi and hence we focus on improving the same and our success is measured based on these numbers. No measurement of qualitative parameters to achieve quantitative numbers , hence not measured and hardly given any  importance. We need stress free corporations and enterprises. We need to change our enterprise success parameters. Something grossly wrong is going on unnoticed.

Chetan Bhagat, Raju Hirani or Aamir Khan, or someone else , who will wake up to these realities and make another 3 Idiots -2 ????

Awaken to the Realities of your Balance Sheet

Earlier I wrote about Importance of Profit Vis a Vis Cash-flow. Yes Cash-flow is necessary but not sufficient. However Cash-flow is infact NECESSARY. 

I recently came in touch with a company with an EPS of Rs.100 plus. Yes they have earned huge profit on their equity but they have defaulted on loan repayment consistently for last 6 months. 

Reason: Profit Earned but not en-cashed. Investors usually goes by EPS and PE etc ratios for deciding about investments. How erroneous it cud be???

On the other side entrepreneurs mostly do not feel the realities of the business performance as long as cash flow is flowing in. Test Check - Just remove potential bad debts , dead stock & dead investments from the Net-worth and see the result. Is the Net-worth is  still positive , thank GOD. I mean it. Most entrepreneurs ignore these facts or even do not know this realities as long as they have cash to take care of their own needs. 

Therefore Profit & Cash-flow both MUST go hand in hand and must be closely watched by the entrepreneurs to remain in business for longer. Any one missing or ignored will KILL the business sooner than expected. 


Weak Cashflow will KILL quicker , weak Profit in the long run. 

Awaken to the realities of your Balance Sheet { Today }.