Are your customers smelling the smoke and defecting?

There's been a large set of forest fires burning up here.

Not close enough to threaten me or my family, but there is a lot of smoke, cloud cover, and ash.

The sun's even taken on an orange/red appearance. Almost like the recent eclipse.

One impact of the fires is that the air here is really messed up.

The first day of kindergarten was cancelled and most buildings are closed up tight.

Eventually, this will all pass. The fires will be put out, the air will clear back up, and the famous Portland rain will wash away the ash.

What about your business?

Are there smoke clouds hanging over it? Is there a dusting of trouble covering every surface?

Take a moment and think.

Even if whatever causing your problems isn't fire-critical, it still can be making your entire organization unhealthy.

If you want to write to someone about it, reply and let me know. I'd be happy to either give you some advice or just be a friendly, impartial person to listen.

I know one ash cloud of problems for most stores starts with customers slowly defecting to a competitor. It can be difficult to detect this without the right data though.

Repeat Customer Insights can help. With it's Customer Latency Report you'll see how many customers are coming back for repeat orders, and how many are defecting.

Eric Davis