by Gayle Kesten

Think your company is easy to do business with? Here are eight great ways to find out, though the underlying premise is the same for all.

Pose as a customer. Simple, yet makes total sense. With customer confidence remaining at depressed levels, this low-effort way to learn what it's like to engage with your business from an outside perspective could give you insight into customer abandonment rates, among other factors.

Credit for the following tips belongs to Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist, author, and entrepreneur whose latest brainchild, Alltop, is an incredible compilation of Web sites organized by tons of categories. (To get an idea, here's the Alltop page that focuses on startups.)

Back from that quick tangent, here's what Kawasaki suggests:

1. Act like a prospective customer and call your company to see how the phone system and receptionist treat you.

2. See if your website has a "Contact Us" section. If it doesn’t, add one. Ensure that it has a street address.

3. Send your company an email asking for customer support and see if someone responds to it.

4. Answer customer support calls or emails (not the one you sent in) for a day.

5. Go out on a sales call with your salespeople and a service call with your service people.

6. Read the documentation or manual that your company provides. Extra credit: See if you can do this without reading glasses.

7. Pretend that you lost the documentation or manual that came with your product or service and try to find it on your website.

8. Register your product or service including finding and reading the serial number of your product. Extra credit: See if you can read your serial number without reading glasses.