When to do Customer Relations Wrong

 

Throughout my management writing career I've developed a reputation for pointing out issues that run contrary to popular opinion. So, when I saw March's theme of customer relations management, I felt I had a duty to not disappoint. The overall theme from my fellow ProjectManagement.com contributors on the topic of customer relations management is, well, how to do it better. So, naturally, I feel compelled to pen a piece on the virtues of doing it worse.

Consider the third graphic in columnist Michael Wood’s article, Rethinking Customer Relationship Management. It depicts scales, with “What Customers Want” being balanced against “What Organizations Want.” Under these categories are the following items:

What Customers Want:

·         Value for Money

·         Predictable, consistent, and positive exchanges

·         Courtesy and responsiveness

·         Hassle-free experiences

·         Reliability

What Organizations Want:

·         Long-term relationships

·         Loyalty (don’t buy from competitors)

·         Frequency of spend

·         Fair profit margins

Based on the amount of verbiage in the comment section, Mr. Wood’s ideas strike his readers as insightful, and I do not mean to imply to the contrary. However, I would depict these scales with the following changes:

What Customers Want: goods/services

What Organizations Want: money

…with any other modifiers being somewhat superfluous.

For example, do “organizations” really want “fair profit margins?” Don’t they really desire confiscatory profit margins? As for customers wanting courtesy and responsiveness – recall the famous Seinfeld episode “The Soup Nazi,” where a carry-out restaurant’s soup was so popular that its employees felt at liberty to, well, abuse its patrons to comic extremes. Of course, when I am out spending my money I like to be treated with courtesy; but the point here is that it may be rather impractical to structure a given business model assuming that some generalized notion of the motives of those involved in economic exchanges can be captured, much less quantified.

Soooo… if an assessment of interior motives won’t serve as a basis for modifying an approach to customer relations management, what will? I’m thinking outward, observable behaviors can be the basis for evaluating and modifying this branch of management. Tackling CRM from this angle quickly leads to Hatfield’s Rule of Customer Relations Management #1: Bad players do not automatically acquire noble or virtuous characteristics upon assuming the role of customer in economic exchanges. In fact, in the retail industry savvy returns managers have learned to identify those customers who are adept at abusing the return process, and will often meet these people’s immediate demands, along with an invitation to not return to that particular establishment. In the time I personally worked in both the food service and retail sectors I observed such outrageous behavior from abusive customers that I found myself wishing to encounter these people outside of my workplace, just to give them their appropriate comeuppance.

This, then, becomes your customer relations mirror: the outward manifestations of your customer base. If your vineyard produces sweet, high-alcohol content wines – the so-called “dessert,” or “fortified” wines – then your clientele is far more likely to consume your product while it is still in the bottle, often wrapped in a paper bag. Should your vineyard, then, include “Predictable, consistent, and positive exchanges” as part of its customer relations management model?

My take: probably not.