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You’re only as strongly as the weakest link. by Doc Pratt When it comes to the relationships you have with your customers or clients you need to look beyond your personal relationship with them to see how strong the overall relationship is. How many different people in the organization “touch” that account? By touch I mean anybody who has had any contact whatsoever with that client. For the purposes of this article I will use the word “client,” also known as the “customer.” If a client calls concerning accounts payables or receivables or any issue related to customer service, that contact is considered a touch. If an assistant or technical person followed-up with your client to ask, or answer, a question that would also be considered a touch. A good exercise to do is to sit down and make a list of all the people who have even a remote chance of talking to your clients or “touching” the account in any way. After you make this list, evaluate each one of their people skills. No matter how hard you try to build the relationship and how long you work at building it, it can be significantly damaged very quickly by someone in your organization saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. You see this all the time with technology companies, especially the ones that pull a “techie” out of a closet and send them to a clients’ site. Techies are known to be task versus people oriented and I have seen many times where an employee, who is totally void of any people skills, is sent to a client site and winds up insulting or ticking off the client to the point that they prefer not to do business with them due to that one contact. I knew someone who was an excellent computer programmer; she could design and develop business applications better than most. She was really a very nice lady but she rubbed people, including her clients, the wrong way. I am guessing this was due to poor communication skills. As long as she was in the office writing and developing programs everything was fine, but when she had to go to client sites in a support capacity everything fell apart. I have talked to many businesses who were frustrated because of the technical support and service people who came to their office and, in one way or another, caused or created problems. It was always because of either a lack of communication skills or something offensive such as the person smoked and left behind a strong odor of smoke or some other unpleasant odor. Since you are only as strong as your weakest link, how strong is your weakest link? Picture two people linked by a chain. On one end is the client and on the other end are you or the person primarily responsible to providing your products or services to the client. Each link in the chain represents people in your organization that interact with the client. Sometimes you have no control over what happens. I was recently onsite at a Fortune 100 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) client of mine to conduct training classes. They have a high level of security there so I always needed someone to come down and escort me into the office. One morning while I was waiting an employee came up and started arguing with the security person at the front desk. She said some rather unpleasant words, yanked some papers out of his hand while he was on the phone and stormed off. She never even looked to see who else was there. I could have easily been a customer instead of a consultant. So could the other three people who witnessed her outburst in the lobby.
Make a list of all the people who will have any form of contact with your client. Using a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, rate each person on their: Friendliness Overall enthusiasm about their job How much they like their job Their ability to communicate with the client Rate each person on the attributes listed above, the average needs to be above 9. Have you ever watched a political debate where they have a group of people in a room watching while holding a device that measures the responses to what the politicians are saying? Every time your client has any interaction with an employee in your business their feelings about your company are always going up or down. You want to make sure that how they feel about the company is ultimately always going up, or at least staying steady. For those employees who are providing service and support to your clients also rate them on: How well do they understand the client’s specific needs, situation or problems? How knowledgeable are they? How quickly do they respond to the client? How good is their rapport with the client? Here again, you want to have individual and combined scores over 9. You may want to ask a few clients how they rate the individuals too so that you will have your own internal ratings of the key attributes to compare with the external ratings from your clients. When you ask clients for this feedback, let them know that you want to be able to provide them with the best possible service and their honest answers and opinions will help you do that. Remember that your relationship is only as strong as your weakest link, if you find a weak link, do your best to fix it ASAP. The strength of YOUR relationship with the client is what really matters, but wouldn’t you rather spend your time getting new clients than having to do damage control and fix unnecessary problems?
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