Creating B-to-B Community Spirit

In today’s competitive arena, you cannot afford to only operate as a product-focused company. Being competitive today requires a renewed focus on building long-term relationships with customers.

The keys to success are building a loyal customer base, ensuring that products and services meet customer needs, having an ongoing competitive intelligence system, having effective and efficient sales/distribution channels and building new business around current customers.

This has been characterized as becoming customer-focused, but it means much more. It means building an interdependent relationship with the customer in which each relies on the other for business solutions and successes. The customer values the relationship and believes in it. You create a common bond with the individual based on a shared “win-win” approach and the customer trusts you. This is building a customer community. This is building long-term strategic relationships.

Community is both a place and a state of mind. The physical part of community is like a neighborhood, and includes such things as frequent transactions and proximity. The state of mind is more elusive. It isn’t a constant. You continually go in and out of a state of community. But you need a commitment to community as a vision or goal to continually strive for. This hinges on economics, integrity, service, balance, personal encouragement and a shared understanding of community.

Let’s look at the customer community process, seeing it as a means to form a covenant with your customer. The basics are:

– Recognize that it is a real person within the account who is the buyer, influencer, decision-maker, specifier, etc. of your product.

– Gather information about customers through repeated contacts with them, using direct mail, telephone and face-to-face contacts.

– Identify shared values (i.e., external service values) from this information.

– Develop a communication and contact plan that delivers value at every point of contact with the individual.

– Cultivate the customer, which leads to building the relationship.

STARTING FROM WITHIN Before you can build a sense of community with the customer, the same must be evident within the organization. You must build community within your company and yourself. Your culture, attitudes, values and the way you treat each other are going to extend to the customer.

For a customer community to exist and flourish, a customer focus must be woven as a common thread through the entire organization. Culture is comprised of the norms, values and beliefs shared by members of the organization. These are directly influenced by your leadership.

The community of customers demands a new style of leadership, often referred to as servant-leadership, which gained credibility in the late 1980s as a leadership style stronger than classic management or administrative styles. Servant-leadership is build around leadership, not management techniques or administrative issues. It is about empowerment. The top executive serves employees – or customers – by helping them understand how they can grow to be the best they can be.

Tim Hoeksema, founding president of Midwest Express Airline, practices servant-leadership. The airline is considered one of the nation’s best regional carriers. “My job,” he says, “is to support my deputies and everyone else – to listen, respond and give them what they need to get the job done. My job is to pitch in wherever I am needed.”

Without a total commitment from top management, customer-focused programs cannot survive. Employee satisfaction and retention are highly correlated to customer satisfaction and retention.

But even with committed leadership, the success or failure of a customer community relies to a great degree on the frontline customer contact person. They must share the values of the concept and be attuned to the customer-focused culture. The individual must have a strong value structure and an appropriate behavorial profile, which translates to ethical behaviors and attitudes in the workplace.

Too often, a person takes a disassociated attitude into the customer relationship. This needs to change at the most basic level – within the person. The personal values that a person brings to the workplace must be consistent with the organization’s cultural values. Matching the core values of the individual and organization is critical. It is only then that the person can begin the process of dealing with customers as individuals, not impersonal accounts.

A client situation, in which an employee was in a business environment that encouraged personal values, illustrates this. A telemarketing rep saw the volume of activity increase fivefold. When she raised the issue with management, the response was that they understood her concerns, but economics would not support additional resources.

In most organizations, this would be the end of it. But this firm professed delivering quality service to the customer. So the rep bypassed the chain of command and proclaimed that this was not an economic dilemma, but rather an issue that struck at the core of the organization. She wasn’t able to deliver quality service under the existing conditions. Her actions caused management to reconsider the previous decision and resources were doubled to handle the increased activity. This is an example of personal integrity coming to the forefront.