Unlock Pivotal Truths to Elevate Customer Relationships
How do you go from ‘good’ to ‘great’ in your relationships with your customers?
For Verity’s clients it’s one of their biggest concerns, and the reason why so many of them ask us to run feedback programmes.
Our innovative customer feedback programme, The Relationship Rating (TRR), is based on research that offers some interesting insights.
At Verity we talk a lot about about Maslow’s Hierarchy. It’s a model that reveals much about how relationships develop between businesses and their customers over time.
There are three levels to the hierarchy. At the bottom, ‘The Fundamentals’, moving upwards into ‘Customer Experience’ and finally ‘Strategic Partnership’.
In business terms, these three levels map onto the increasing quality of the relationship between a company and its customer. It moves the relationship from being merely a transactional one to a more strategic one.
At the most basic level, the company provides a service, sometimes good, sometimes bad. At the second level, the relationship is a little stronger, with trust building and the customer viewing the company as one that responds well to feedback, fixes issues quickly and provides a good customer experience.
But how do you move from that level – ‘good’ – to the highest – ‘great’?
B2B Feedback Profile – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to The Relationship Rating
Comparing ‘good’ with ‘great’
The diagram below offers an interesting insight into how companies move from getting good feedback (a high Supporter rating) to great feedback (a high Advocate rating).
In the diagram, we’ve collated our feedback and plotted the issues that our clients talk about most onto the three Maslow categories. The fundamental themes are in red, customer experience themes are in the middle and strategic partnership themes are at the top.
The profile on the right is our ‘benchmark’ norm. To get this, we’ve taken all of the feedback we get from our clients globally and combined it. This average rating for all our clients is currently tracking at a high ‘Supporter’ level.
It’s when you compare it to the profile on the left that things get really interesting. This profile is for one of our clients who consistently achieves a high ‘Advocate’ rating.
But why are they getting such great ratings? Where does the difference lie?
Look again at the benchmark profile on the right. Most of the feedback we receive here relates to the bottom two-thirds of Maslow’s Hierarchy. These are generally conversations about operational issues and customer service levels.
Compare this with the profile for our client with the high Advocate rating, which shows a much more even spread of feedback.
Even more striking however is the high level of feedback given in the top part of our Maslow pyramid. And this is where we can begin to understand what really makes the difference between achieving ‘OK to good’ and ‘great’ ratings.
The difference
To put the question another way: what do businesses that score in the ‘high eights’, do better than those who score in the ‘high sevens’? The key, as our research has shown, lies in unlocking the most important strategic relationships.
By this, we mean improving the quality of those interactions, right across the organisation. We’ve found that the most effective way to strengthen customer relationships is to make it a collective effort. This isn’t just something for the senior team. Every part of an organisation needs to collaborate, and to work to create a shared culture of customer focus.
This is when you’re moving into the upper realms of Maslow’s Hierarchy – you’re getting the basics done, of course, and your operations are performing solidly. But now you’re also doing much more. You’re working collaboratively with your customers. You’re helping them to innovate, and you’re directly influencing how they think about the future.
Your business has moved way beyond being ‘just a supplier’ – you are now a partner who’s helping them to shape their strategy going forward.
And the best part of it is that your customers trust you to do it.
Taking customer relationships to the next level
The bottom line? That going from ‘good’ to ‘great’ in your customer relationships requires investment – almost certainly in time for your senior management team. It also requires a cultural shift to an open and collaborative style of working with your customers. Ultimately, you need to become a customer-centric organisation.
The kind of actionable insights we deliver here at Verity Relationship Intelligence are relevant for many different levels of our customers’ businesses.
But it’s likely that discussions about changes in areas such as greater collaboration, improved strategic thinking and key relationships will be carried out at a senior level, on both sides of the table.
And that’s one of the areas where our work adds real value for our clients’ businesses.
The quality of the data we collect, and – crucially – the expertise of our consultants who then identify the ‘pivotal truths’ that really matter to your customers, are the differentiator.
With our insights backing you up, you’re able to justify your actions at the highest levels, and then take them with genuine confidence.
