How do you manage relationships with customers?

So how do you manage relations with customers?  (Biff, get your mind out of the gutter! :-)

First, listen. Mostly, people want to talk to you; people love to be heard, and make a difference. The absolute easiest thing to do is to ignore people, especially those you think have nothing to do with your product. You can’t do this in the age of the internet!

Second, be responsive. Even “No, sorry, we can’t do that (but here’s what we can do)” is much better than silence.

Third, be fair. Most people have an innate sense of fairness - they recognize when they have been wronged and deserve compensation, but they also know that business can’t give away the store and expect to survive. On the sales side, people all want the best price but will recognize that long-term contracts and volume buying will change prices.

This is all very high-level and rah-rah. So how do you actually do it?

For the past 25 or 30 years, part of the answer has been a CRM System, a computer application to help capture data and report on that data. For all the advances in technology, the basics haven’t changed. Each time your employees interact with a customer, capture the information. Whether it's an inbound telephone or field salesperson visiting a customer, you go through the same basic process.

• Name / Address / Phone. (See if there are prior contacts with them first.)
• Role - who are they?
• Why are you talking to them, and what are you saying? (Complaints / suggestions? Selling something?  And did they reach out to you, or did you contact them?)
• What product are you talking about?
• What are the next steps you should take?

A good salesman or call center rep will do this sort of thing on their own. And until the advent of cheap computers in the 1980s, that was as far as it went. But computers added data entry efficiency and most importantly, reporting. A recurring complaint can be trended, and corrective action taken. Sales effort can be compared to results. There is a large, fertile field of CRM Metrics (see my next post), and properly done, collecting and acting on the metrics will change your business for the better.