Being Married to Your Customers, Part 2: The Marriage September 02, 2011, by Peter Mirus in Marketing
In both marriage and business, the cost of not having a good relationship can be very high.
In a marriage, it costs a lot to get divorced: estimates that I have seen indicate that the average cost of a contested divorce is between $20,000 and $40,000—and that is just considering legal fees.
The cost of losing customers due to poor relationship management can also be high. One firm with which I am acquainted lost 30% of its total business in a week through lack of attentiveness to customer needs.
What are the symptoms of a negative relationship?
I have worked with companies that are naturally good at relationship management, and others that are horrible at it. You can recognize right away the difference between the two. In companies that are horrible at relationship management, every perceived problem is automatically escalated to the highest volume, and the blame is always placed squarely in the other camp.
If you have been around multiple businesses, you know that there is often a negative tendency to attribute differing priorities between the company and the customer to “unreasonableness”. If the customer wants something that the company doesn’t seem to be able to provide, the company is being “unreasonable”. Likewise, the company thinks that the customer is “unreasonable” for wanting what it wants. If you have been around enough marriages, you’ll see the same negative tendency.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Good relationship managers both in marriage and in business make the “exchange of differences” productive and positive, work to resolve differences when possible, and ensure that respect and personal responsibility remain a focus. In this way, the customer/spouse always feels valued—even when the decision is to “agree to disagree” or to resolve the difference at a future date.
One byproduct of good relationship management: it keeps the tone of conversation amicable and placid, and that can go a long way in helping both parties feel out the “difference between the differences”. When there isn’t a productive dialogue, all differences seem large—but logically, we know that there are degrees of differences, and each difference has its own importance relative to the others.
Because the skills necessary for good relationship management both in business and in personal relationships are so comparable, I often tell both the staff at my firm and our clients that learning good relationship management (within sales work, project management, personnel management, etc.) will benefit them in their personal lives—because that is the truth. How we handle workplace relationships can spill over into our personal lives, and vice versa.