Customer Relationships

Question 1

What are customer relationship?

Answer 1

• Describe the types of relationships a company establishes with specific customer segments
• Reciprocal learning with different stakeholders

Question 2

What motivations are CR’s driven by?

Answer 2

• Customer acquisition
• Customer retention
• Boosting sales/upselling

Question 3

What types of CR’s are there?

Answer 3

• Personal Relationships
• Self Service Relationship
• Community Relationships
• Co-Creation Relationships

Question 4

What are personal relationships?

Answer 4

• Those based on human interaction
• Can take place before, during or after a customer engages with your solution
• Sometimes these relationship can be standardised, but for certain customers or solutions, a more individual approach is necessary

Question 5

What are self service relationships?

Answer 5

• Those where you provide your cusomters with all the necessary tools and information to engage with your solution, without the need for your personal assistance or presence
• Can be automated

Question 6

What are community relationships?

Answer 6

• Those where you provide customers with a platform through which they can offer each other help and support, sharing their experiences with regards to both the problem and your solution
• These act as a form of peer and expert selection system
• They develop your referral markets and allow for network effects to occur among your different customer segments
• They require a delicate balance of openness and governance depending on the nature of the value proposition

Question 7

What are co-creation relationships?

Answer 7

• Those where your customers take part in the continuous development of your solution. Sometimes this will allow your customer to provide insight regarding additional features that the solution may require, or simply allow them to generate content for other customers to consumes
• Continuous and iterative process

Question 8

What areas of focus are required of relationships strategy/marketing/managing?

Answer 8

• 1. The interaction process
• 2. A planned communication process
• 3. A value process as the output of relationship marketing:

Question 9

What is important in the planned communication process in relationship marketing/strategy?

Answer 9

• Supporting development and enhancement of relationships
• This process increasingly involves integration of a wide range of communications
• Integrated communications are however not enough to generate relaiotnship marketing
• For relationship marketing, the critical aspect is a two way dialogue (CF collaborative and absorptive capacity)
• It is also critical to recognise the manage communications that occur outside of the context of the firm

Question 10

What are the sources of the planned communication process in relationship marketing/strategy?

Answer 10

• Planned messages
  
  • e.g. advertising, brochures
• Product messages
  
  • Usefulness, design, appearance
• Service messages
  
  • Deliveries, invoicing, claims handling
• Unplanned messages
  
  • Word-of-mouth referrals, references, news
• Absence of communicaiton
  
  • Service breakdown, lack of info re progress