It’s an interesting conundrum: Give staff time and focus to cultivate relationships and they still revert to their old transactional behavior.
What gives?
Recent conversations with B2B companies suggest that despite dedicated, top-tier account teams and lengthy training workshops on relationship building, companies still don’t see the quality of customer relationships improving.
These conversations have come up quite a bit lately, so I’m turning my short-hand notes and ideas inside out. A few observations:
1. A series of transactions does not equal a relationship—This seems intuitive, but companies frequently reference this mistake. Many still equate the number of customer interactions with the value customers derive from the company. Yet simply processing orders and asking about a daughter’s dance recital at the beginning of a conversation does not build a lasting relationship. And in fact, the more interactions customers have, in some cases, the higher the level of customer effort and more disloyal the customer. Follow the adage: Think quality—understanding customer priorities and needs—not necessarily quantity.
How to act on this? Assess what activities your staff does to build relationships and how they prioritize relationship-building. CCC Members, our B2B Key Account Rep Activity Audit is an effective diagnostic tool.
Preferred Channels for Issue Resolution | Click Image to Enlarge
2. Don’t make assumptions about customers—Companies often mandate that high-value customers receive high-touch service or all key accounts must have 1:1 relationships. But many high-value customers don’t actually like or appreciate this level of service, leading to wasted resources. In fact, CCC research on customer channel preferences finds that only the smallest accounts prefer live service over the Web; all other customers ($100 Million-$10 Billion in annual revenue) prefer self-service to resolve issues.
How to act on this? Ask customers what they want and need—either informally or formally. CCC Members, for more data on B2B customer channel preferences, please refer to our research on Cost Savings Customers Want.
3. Empower staff to make good decisions—Enable reps to have input on and ownership over how to serve accounts. Ask staff to assess customer priorities, desired outcomes, and preferred service interactions and then use this to guide the customer to tailored offerings. Not only does this improve the quality of the relationship but it also has big business impact as well: Tailoring service offerings to customers has the potential to drive customer loyalty by 132%.
How to act on this? Involve staff in creating and applying a simple and scalable service segmentation scheme based on customer preferences. CCC Members, our research on Needs-Based Segmentation has detail on how to do this effectively.
Thoughts as to other ways to ensure we invest our relationship resources wisely and build lasting relationships? Help CCC shift its thinking, too.
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