Business relationships are the connections, interactions, and communications between a company and its stakeholders. These relationships can have value for the company, known as relational capital. In general, a company with positive relationships with its stakeholders is more valuable than a company with negative relationships and a poor reputation among its stakeholders. The following are the basic types of business relationship.
Employee Relations
The relationships between a firm and its employees including formal communications, controls, policies and informal elements such as organization culture. Employee relations is important to productivity, creativity and retention of talent. Relationships with employees also has repercussions for public relations as employees represent your firm and are a source of information for all stakeholders.
- Employee Motivation
- Employee Satisfaction
- Employer Branding
- Human Resources
- Internal Branding
- Leadership
- Onboarding
- Organizational Culture
Customer Relationships
Customer relationships encompass all interactions between your employees and your customers and all communications with customers. This includes any customer facing function such as sales, customer service and promotion.
- Customer Is Always Right
- Customer Loyalty
- Customer Recovery
- Customer Service
- Personal Selling
- Sales
- Single Point Of Contact
Customer Experience
Customer experience is the end-to-end set of interactions between a customer and your brand. This is an expansive concept that includes the usability of your products and brand perceptions.
- Brand Image
- Customer Expectations
- Design
- Moment Of Truth
- Perceived Value
- Quality
- Usability
Lead Users
Lead users are customers who you engage to improve your designs, marketing and customer experience. Firms may partner with customers who are influencers in a culture or industry. Alternatively, a firm may openly partner with all customers such that all customers have an opportunity to influence products and services.
- Brand Culture
- Customer Interviews
- Market Research
- Naive Design
- Test Marketing
- User Story
- Voice Of The Customer
Partnerships
Developing, improving and leveraging partnerships with other businesses in areas such as promotion, distribution, supply chain, outsourcing and research & development. This includes the end-to-end process of building a productive and positive relationship with partners and managing their performance.
- Distribution
- Outsourcing
- Partner Risk
- Performance Management
- Strategic Partners
- Supply Chain Management
- Value Added Resellers
Investor Relations
The process of raising capital for your business and managing relationships with investors, creditors and regulators. Effectively communicating information about the position, performance, risks and opportunities of your firm can influence your cost of capital and access to funding. As such, this is a key responsibility of executive management.
- Compliance
- Cost Of Capital
- Fiduciary Duty
- Insider Information
- Refinancing Risk
- Risk
Public Relations
Public relations is the top level function in an organization for managing communications and relationships with all stakeholders including investors, employees, customers, partners, governments, communities, media representatives and industry influencers. This is often focused on your most important communications such as news, crisis communications and product releases.
- Communication
- Corporate Identity
- Corporate Reputation
- Extended Producer Responsibility
- Integrated Marketing Communications
- Reputational Risk
- Sustainability
