Does your finance area have a service mentality? Or does it often seem at times that departments in the company have to go out of their way to meet the needs of finance?

Here are some signs of a self-focused finance area:

• A large number of special reports needed for the finance department that require manual or special effort to pull together.
• Many reports just used in finance and not useful for the rest of the company.
• At larger companies, the corporate finance office stays put in the home office and rarely ventures out to the field.
• Systems that are very seamless for finance, but dysfunctional for other parts of the company.
• No metrics in place to measure the service that finance provides.

Fortunately, times are changing. Entire companies are becoming more customer focused. They are looking at customer service metrics that they would never have tracked before or changing the metrics to reflect what the customer wants instead.

For example, at Home Depot, they used to measure their customer service phone-in area by the number of phone calls that they handled and how quickly calls were answered. The result- customer service representatives hurried through phone calls, but was the customer really happy? Did anything come out of the phone calls?

Instead, they changed their focus and instead emphasized generating additional sales through this customer service area. Phone rep compensation was changed so they received overrides on additional sales generated. Instead of watching the clock to see how quickly they could roll on to the next call, they paid more attention to the customers. Instead of how fast can we get done, the idea became "How can I help you. Even a giant like Home Depot found new growth.

The same can apply to finance. It starts with a shift in focus- a service mentality- asking how finance can help you.

In closing, look at your company and ask this question- is finance working for the company or is the company working for finance?