Customer Relationships

Customer Relationships

Customer Relationships Jonathan Poland

Customer relationships refer to the interactions between a business and its potential, current, and former customers. These interactions can take various forms, such as personal conversations, communications through various channels, and interactions with products, services, and environments. Building strong customer relationships is essential for businesses, as it helps to foster customer loyalty, promote positive word-of-mouth, and drive long-term growth. To build strong customer relationships, businesses need to focus on providing high-quality products and services, addressing customer concerns and needs, and creating a positive customer experience. By doing so, businesses can create long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with their customers.

Public Relations
Public relations is the process of communicating with the stakeholders of a firm including investors, customers, employees, partners, media representatives, influencers, industry insiders, governments and communities. Public relations impacts the perceptions of a firm amongst potential, current and former customers.

  • Communication
  • Corporate Identity
  • Corporate Reputation
  • External Stakeholders
  • Integrated Marketing Communications
  • Message Framing
  • Primary Stakeholders

Promotion
Promotion of products and services such as advertising and events. This can have a impact on how customers feel about you in areas such as image, reputation and quality.

  • Advertising
  • Alliance Marketing
  • Attention Economics
  • Marketing Messages
  • Mere Exposure Effect
  • Nudge Theory
  • Target Audience

Business Relationships
The process of building relationships with business customers in areas such as sales, operations and customer support. It is common for business customers to be given an account executive as a single point of contact for requests and inquiries.

  • Customer Lifetime Value
  • Customer Retention
  • Influencing
  • Managing Expectations
  • Negotiation
  • Personal Selling
  • Prospecting
  • Sales Development

Product Experience
The day-to-day interactions between your customers and your products and services. Product experience can cause a customer to develop goodwill towards your brand or cause them to be dissatisfied. For example, a software product that often shows a customer an error message, disrupting their productivity, may cause dissatisfaction that damages the customer relationship.

  • Bliss Point
  • Customer Perceptions
  • Customer Satisfaction
  • Principle Of Least Astonishment
  • Product Design
  • Quality
  • Usability

Customer Service
Customer service is any interaction between your brand and the customer that is relevant to the delivery of your obligations to the customer. This can be a personal interaction such as a request to front desk staff at a hotel or an interaction with a self-service tool such as an inquiry on a website.

  • Anticipating Objections
  • Customer Advocates
  • Customer Is Always Right
  • Escalation
  • Product Knowledge
  • Self Service
  • Ticket Management

Brand Experience
Brand experience is the end-to-end set of interactions that influence a customer’s view of your brand. This can include word of mouth or media information about your brand. It also includes how customers feel about your brand such as perceptions of your brand name and visual symbols.

  • Brand Awareness
  • Brand Culture
  • Brand Identity
  • Brand Image
  • Brand Legacy
  • Moment Of Truth
  • Visual Branding

Lead Users
A lead user is a customer that is engaged with your brand such that they contribute to building it. Firms may engage users who are pushing their products to their limits to guide design and marketing. Alternatively, firms may engage all customers as partners or engage a culture, super culture or subculture that is related to the brand.

  • Context Of Use
  • Customer Expectations
  • Customer Motivations
  • Customer Requirements
  • Experience Sampling
  • Ladder Interviews
  • Market Research
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