Building customer relationships in four steps

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Identify customers individually. Obviously, you can’t have a relationship with an audience or a population, but only with an individual. So before you can establish a relationship you must be capable of identifying customers, one customer at a time.

Differentiate customers, one from another. Customers differ from each other, in terms of both their value to your business, and what they need from your business. What a customer needs from you will drive behaviour that you can observe. And behaviour will create (or destroy) value.

Interact with customers. Almost by definition, a relationship depends on some interaction between two parties. You want those interactions to be cost-efficient, so drive more and more interactions into more efficient channels. But you also want them to be effective - that is, to tell you something about the customer’s needs or value, for instance, that you can’t learn simply by observing.

Customise for customers. The “pay off step” for managing a customer relationship comes when your business behaves differently toward that customer. We call this “customisation” even though we’re not necessarily talking about it in terms of literally customising the product or service. But whenever we treat Customer A different from Customer B, based on what we think we know about their differences, we are “customising” the customer’s treatment.

The first two tasks – identifying customers and differentiating them – are steps that a company can take in the privacy of its own IT department. Your company has a database of individual customer records; you track the transactions of individual customers in order to better understand both their value and their needs.

By contrast, the third step – interaction – demands the customer’s personal attention and participation. You can’t interact unless there’s someone else on the other end of the interaction, right? And the fourth step, customising your behaviour in some way to a particular customer, also involves the individual customer directly, as the “recipient” of this behaviour.

Source: navigossearch.com ; Inc.com ; Linkedin.com ; forbes.com; Tlnt.com