Empower your Public Relations team with customer contact management for Public Relations

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let me try to explain this problem to you a women friend who who drives to a nearby video rental store and she goes in and she spends about $250 a year renting videos buying a few DVDs things like that and after a while she buys a DVD and of course it comes with a lifetime guarantee she gives it to her daughter for a birthday a few months later and and and there's a jitter in it so she brings it back and she says you know I want my money back I spent eight dollars on this this DVD and I need that back and and and the people the store said fine where's your paper receipt and she says well I don't have the paper receipt you had a you had a free video rental on it and so I use that and they said well I'm sorry without the paper receipt we can't give you your $8 back and she says well wait are you worried that I didn't get it here you got an electronic record by now they're getting the store manager into the act and then they pull up her record and sure enough there's the full list of everything she's ever rented from them and everything she's ever bought and of course the DVDs got their stickers all over it and everything so yes they can confirm and they make it clear to her yes we we acknowledge that in fact you bought the DVD from us but we can't give you back here eight dollars without the paper receipt and so she takes her DVD and she walks out the door with this useless DVD and she never comes back again so she spent about a thousand dollars in the last four years presumably she could have spent a thousand dollars in the next four years but now she won't now that was a stupid thing for the store to do right why in the world would companies do things like that because we see it at this video rental store we see it at giant companies we see it in business to consumers we see it in business-to-business why in the world are companies doing things like that so if customers are the most unique non replicable measurably valuable asset we have then this is the most important question that I have to ask you who is managing that asset for your company right now you've got sales territory managers you've got pipeline managers you got regional managers you got to bank branch managers and store managers and web Meister's and promotions and campaigns managers and brand managers and product managers and the list goes on and on and all of those people are important but the most valuable asset you have is this customer and this one in this one who's managing that who's responsible for making sure that we know what the value that customer is today what the value of that customer will be tomorrow and how we're going to increase the value of that customer how we're going to keep that customer longer and how we're going to grow him bigger I'll tell you what shareholders want they want to know that we can really grow the value of our company the old-fashioned way they want to know that we can really figure out how to get customers and then how to grow them big or how to get them to buy more from us how to keep them buying more from us how to buy more within more of our product categories how to grow the organic way because when we can do that then we're presenting real value to our customers and that's how we give real value to our shareholders at the same time you treat the customer the way you would want to be treated we're going to have relationships with customers we're going to have to build trust we're going to have to look out for their interests as we do our own and that's what we trust USAA insurance to do to look out for our interests as well as there's a FedEx is able now to handle 89 thousand calls on their in their various call centers and they do that with a lot less turnover than they used to have why because they've empowered their employees to handle the problem on the first call guess what not only are their customers a lot more satisfied but they reduce their turnover by twenty twenty percent Stena is a Irish Sea route that has a ferry lines and basically what they do is they used to have a horrible reputation for service they decided to turn that around so now within about 30 minutes of landing nearly every customer every passenger is asked how was this for you and if anybody has a negative answer then that employee whoever asks the question everybody ever also 600 employees anybody is is allowed to is empowered to fix that problem up to a thousand pounds worth a thousand pounds that's pretty expensive right how many times the last four years since this has been in effect do you think they've had to spend a thousand pounds to fix this answer zero exactly right because well but you know what it means it means that no employee can say that's not my job call back on Monday and then maybe they'll fix it you know that means every employee has the responsibility as well as the right to make sure that customers are satisfied and that we'll remember something about them these are the kinds of companies that are really building value in partnership with mr. peppers Martha Rodgers has authored a series of international bestsellers including the one the one future which ink magazine called one or two of the three most important business books ever written other books in this series include enterprise one-to-one the one-to-one fuel book the one-to-one manager one-to-one b2b managing customer relationships return on customer and their latest work rules to break in laws to follow these bestsellers push business executives to think differently about their businesses and have offered some of the most innovative new ideas in business when we think about why it's important to have relationships with customers I think a lot of people are really thinking you say is about oh yeah because you know it's important to have a good customer service or it's important to personalize the email or it's great to have a CRM technology in place and all those things can be important but none of them are really at the heart of increasing the value of customers to us or for that matter increasing our value to customers when we think about relationships the whole point is to really build this element of interactivity of getting customers to talk to us and us to them of learning more about customers have got and getting smarter about them anticipating what they want from us building a culture of trust building a relationship of trust and if we do that then it gives us a different way of thinking about how to grow that that customer base and the value of it I think about this if I were to be able to rank order my customer base by value then I would know that I have a lot of customers who are are keeping me in business or maybe it's a few but I have a group of customers who are really valuable to me and those are the customers keeping me in business and then I have a few customers at the bottom and those customers are the ones that no matter what I do they're going to be worth less than what I have to spend to keep them and so in a in a warm and loving way I'd really like for them to get into the arms of my competitors and then of course I've got a bunch of customers in the middle and they have different values to me and they have different anticipated and potential values to me what if instead of just thinking about how to increase the value of my brand or how to get more customers that look exactly like the customers I have what if my goal were to try to increase the value of each of the customers I have and when I do find new customers to think about how to find customers that look a lot more like my valuable customers and how to avoid the one that look like less than zeros those below zero customers those bzees