By Mike Muhney
I don’t know about you, but it seems curious to me that despite all of the technology that has emerged, especially in the last five years regarding mobile, cloud and social media, has anything actually really changed in regards toward customers? Before you readily leap to the response, look around you and observe the reality of the market and your own business today.
Are physical meetings less important or more important? Has your use of having an actual phone conversation changed in importance? Do you have the same level of personal interaction, regardless of method, that you did before the last five years? If so, was it with more or fewer customers? Overall, are your relationships deeper or shallower than they were earlier? Has quantity increased while quality has lessened in meaningful and real relationships? These are not insignificant questions to ask yourself.
One thing has changed in the last five years for sure – the customers themselves have more means than ever before to both improve or decimate your reputation and therefore the importance of how you develop relationships with them has intensified against a backdrop of greater access to more people than ever before. But is that really important? What is at risk here, after all, is the difference between the illusions of your customer relationships versus the reality of them.
Let me even present an additional element added to the conundrum of myriad ways one can use today between buyer and seller. I am not talking about marketing, but sales. Marketing is clearly, in comparison, more about interactions, whereas sales is more about engagement. But as much as you can apply your marketing efforts more widely, even more cheaply, than ever before, if it doesnft produce more engagements what good is it? If you had a choice between 100 percent marketing and no sales, or 100 percent sales and no marketing, which would you choose?
In fact, the reality is that the scales need to be kept in balance. In fact, what we really need to be focused on goes beyond both interaction and engagement. It has to do with an overlooked, in my opinion, dimension that I will call Relational Health. After all, whether it be interaction or engagement, neither has any sustainability if it all isnft kept healthy to begin with.
So much of the focus that we are surrounded by today in the forms of print magazines, self-help books, bloggers, consultants, software categories, etc. is devoted to the general descriptor of “managing” your relationships. But when was the last time that in your own business all of your focus, energy – both physical AND mental – and efforts concentrated on the realm of customer relationship health? Probably not as much (if at all) as it should be, and more so.
There is no question that when thoughtfully considered we are really and truthfully unable to gmanageh any relationship. By default, that entire perspective would indicate that you are able to impose something on someone else, regardless of whether or not it was voluntarily or involuntarily received by the other person. Maybe, perhaps, I can gmanageh those who might work for me, but is it realistic to think that I can gmanageh others outside of that – especially customers? I would argue not.
What I can do though, if we want to apply the gmanagementh effort somewhere, is to direct it to ourselves. I can manage my own time, my own thoughts and my own actions. And, in doing so, I should then be better able to focus on what really matters between the seller and customer – the health of the relationship.
Nothing beats time, attention and authenticity in working to develop and maintain customer relationship health. Utilizing all of the available means with which to assist in this process is fine, but given a choice, exercising the right focus will be the best prescription for avoiding interaction and engagement sickness, if not elimination altogether. Prevention occurs only when effort is applied the right way to create healthy, meaningful and successful customer relationship outcomes.
Mike Muhney is the CEO & Co-Founder of VIPorbit Software, the creator of the Mobile Relationship Management category focusing on today’s users of mobile devices. He is also the Co-Founder & Co-Inventor of ACT!, the product that created the Contact Management category altogether. He can be reached at [email protected].
