Relationships Beat Transactions
· Relationships Beat Transactions
· Questions beat Answers
I have been going into details on each (very slowly if you have been paying attention). If you have questions or other examples to put into the posts – please add them into the comments. This is the third post in the series:
Relationships beat Transactions:
Most companies are structured to talk and not listen (marketing, PR, tradshows and events etc.). Similarly, most companies are structured to reward transactions (the sale, the time it takes to process a support call etc.) as opposed to relationships. This is in large part due to the fact that relationships are more difficult to measure. However in the network economy it is strong relationships that insulate a company from price sensitivity, create word of mouth, and foster collaboration (see Open Beats Closed). Just because it is harder to measure doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working hard on building stronger relationships. (and just to be clear – relationships beat transactions doesn’t mean giving up core skills on managing operational efficiency. It does mean that those core skill no longer differentiate you from your competition).
Here is how:
Engage the Community beyond your borders
There is a world of conversation taking place about your company. I have long wanted to write a post titled, “Your Company Sucks – But Don’t Take My Word For It….” About how many Facebook groups are solely organized around how your company sucks (If you don’t believe me – just start searching for your company + “sucks” in Facebook or Google. If you are in a company of good size, prepare to be appalled.) There are tons of good ways to get started listening to what people are saying about you on the social web. You can get started here. Once you are tuned in – you can start participating in some form. Since the web is essentially an emergent (bottom up) force – it is best to think about responding in a similar way. Consider how you might empower your employees to adopt social tools. At my employer, O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly has led the charge by blogging and avidly using Twitter. He models the behavior, tone and manner of how these social technologies are used at O’Reilly. This goes a long way. There are dozens of O’Reilly employees listening, responding and posting to the social web everyday. This far exceeds what any single, top-down strategy could get done – which leads me to the next point.
Mobilize Your Workforce
As the number of customer-to-company interactions increase – it is hard to scale relationships through traditional, narrowly-controlled broadcast channels. Customers expect some level of interaction if not intimacy with the brands they are engaging with and five people in marketing aren’t going to get you there… Digital outreach should no longer be the sole domain of marketers. In other words, the whole workforce can be motivated to participate. The key is appropriate training. Intel is doing a good job by providing a Digital IQ workshop. This is also the idea behind the innovation labs I run.
Start Operating within the Social Contract
We have many years of refining a martial model of management that centers on routinization of work and command and control hierarchy. We have extracted as much productivity as we are likely to get from these techniques. We are entering an era when the more fluid, open models of collaboration and cooperation will be the ground where competitive advantage is won and lost. But playing on this field has different rules. It requires operating under a social contract – social contracts are very different from business contracts that dominate the 20th century organizational mentality. In the business contract the basic metaphor is the binding, legal contract. The basic metaphor for the social web is relationship. The building blocks are trust, reciprocity and authenticity. This is the hardest change for companies to make because it involves a fundamental shift in culture. For more on this – see my Forbes post – Why Business Needs to Get Social.
Realize that Customer Service is the New Marketing
In an always-on environment companies need to stay engaged on a personal level with the people they interact with. Customer Service is the New Marketing simply because every customer is now a broadcast tower and their opinions carry a whole lot of weight. It also means you should probably stop looking at your call center as a cost center and more like a public relations department (though I dread the connotation of that word).
Examples of great relationship companies – The Ritz-Carlton hotel where every guest is recognized and remembered and where every employee is empowered to solve any customer issue they encounter (‘If you find a customer problem, you own the problem” is one of their mantras), Zappos, where every first customer is surprised by an upgrade to overnight shipping and the customer service is legendary. And I humbly submit my company O’Reilly Media – where we constantly have our ear to the ground. If we find an unhappy customer on the web – we try and fix it. When your problem gets fixed without you ever directly contacting customer service – that can be a conversion moment.
For more on this subject see my post on Emotional Transactions or “Moment of Truth: We are all Marketers Now”
