George F. Brown, Jr., CEO, Blue Canyon Partners, Inc.
Orignally Appeared:
August 01, 2011
TMC.net
Print This ArticleThird, bring clarity, energy, and an active cadence to these interactions. Among the firms that were part of the horror stories, we often heard laments like “we tried that once, but it didn’t really work” and “we do have an annual executive meeting with [some customer], but it’s largely ceremonial”. It takes a real commitment – and usually a very proactive champion – to jump start an effective relationship with a customer organization. And it’s very easy to back slide and return to a low energy, infrequent mode of interacting. If your organization is going to make a commitment to a customer relationship, make it real and make it work.
Best practice organizations have a plan for their interactions with customers, and ensure that someone is responsible for making that plan happen. One executive that several years ago was quoted as saying that he intended to make his company more customer-facing described his thinking as follows:
“Soon after I got onto the customer-facing bandwagon, I asked myself ‘Why do you believe in this?’ That question started off a process, which we implemented for each of our most important customer relationships. I got a team together, from all parts of the company. And we sat together and tried to answer the question ‘What could we accomplish if we had a better relationship with this customer?’ Some of the people in the room had never met anyone in that customer organization, but everyone had ideas and opinions. What came out of this process was a blueprint for what it meant, customer by customer, to be customer-facing. And we then knew what to do and who to involve.”
Finally, we’ve all heard some version of the statement “if it’s not measured, it doesn’t matter”. That truth applies here as well. If your organization is going to be committed to customer relationships, there should be meaningful measurements in place reflecting the goals of the program, including What, Who, and When dimensions. The best firms not only have such measurements in place in the form of dashboards and scorecards, but they also share them with their customers (and in many cases gain the benefit of customer buy-in to the goals). It’s not just having measurements in place that is important. A significant part of the value comes from the process of deciding what the goals should be, a great way of getting others throughout the organization to think about how they can best contribute to strong collaborative customer relationships.
No one can guarantee a future success story or that future horror stories can be completely avoided, but the evidence is strong that those companies that connect effectively with their customers will make the former roster and avoid the latter one. Taking the steps needed to make your entire company customer-facing is a key first step towards a future in which the stories told about your firm will be ones that you’ll be delighted to repeat.
[1] See CoDestiny: Overcome Your Growth Challenges by Helping Your Customers Overcome Theirs, by Atlee Valentine Pope and George F. Brown, Jr., Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press, © 2010
