The economy is perking along, despite what the Washington Wizards tell us—the small businesses I talk to are generally too busy to come have a free lunch with us in Solutions Forum!

Since you’re all busy, we’ve found that your staff might be relenting a bit on it’s customer focus.

In fact, in our new book on Starting, Running and Selling Your Business, we’ve come up with a new term: Customer Centric, which means what you do revolves around your customers.

Some things to look for in determining whether you’re customer centric enough:

1. What’s your customer loss rate (should be less than 10%) in the last year?
2. What’s your customer complaint ratio through all of your activities….production, sales, marketing, post-sale service. Just figuring out how many customer transactions you had is an interesting task.
3. Have you done any recent customer surveys to measure customer satisfaction?
4. Do you have a customer advisory panel?

There are probably more questions you could ask, but these will start you in the right direction