Are You Faking It With Your Customers?

George Burns was talking about acting, but a lot of companies apparently take his advice when it comes to their customer relationship management programs.

All around us, companies try desperately to fake their sincerity with individual customers. Deep down, however, they don’t want your friendship. They want your money.

• A communication from a company you do business with addresses you by the legal first name that you never use (“Donald” in my case), in order to seem more friendly and accessible.
• You call in to fix a service problem and you’re put on hold with the classic (and widely parodied) phrase “Your call is very important to us.”
• An email explains that because your patronage is so valued by the company, a “special offer” has been devised just for you.

Technology is largely responsible for this upsurge in fake sincerity. Only in the last couple of decades has it become technically possible to interact in real time with individual customers, at scale. These new information technologies – customer databases, call routing, email, and the like – require companies to acknowledge the fact that they have ongoing, individual relationships with individual customers. Every customer is different, every customer has a memory, and every customer has his or her own uniquely individual set of problems and needs.

Before these technologies became available, the consumer economy functioned quite differently. A company would craft a product with unique attributes, advertise its availability, and wait for consumers to find it and buy it. Every purchase transaction was a single, isolated event – a zero-sum game, if you will. The consumer wanted the most value at the lowest price, while the marketer wanted just the opposite. Every additional dollar either one took from the purchase transaction came directly out of the other’s pocket.

Perhaps this is a simplistic and overly harsh way to describe it, but the reality is that for a hundred years, as the consumer economy continued to ramp up with more and more efficient mass production processes, the “human element” was sucked out of commerce.

Today, however, businesses can “remember” their customers individually, the way customers remember them. They can treat different customers differently, the way customers treat different businesses differently. And to be competitively successful, today’s business has to engage individual customers in relationships – with each relationship developing its own individual context and history, becoming more valuable to both sides over time.

The problem many businesses have, unfortunately, is that they still can’t look a customer in the eye without seeing dollar signs. They rationalize this by declaring that the central purpose of any business, after all, is to generate a profit and create shareholder value. But while this statement is technically correct, it misses the point.

The real point is that fake sincerity doesn't create more shareholder value. Fake sincerity puts customers on their guard and destroys shareholder value.

If the only reason your business engages customers in “relationships” is to sell more stuff, you’re almost certain to fail. Genuine relationships cannot be based on one side’s fake sincerity for the other.

On the other hand, if your business engages customers in relationships in order to add more value for each customer – providing a more individually relevant product, or a more timely delivery, or a less expensive transaction – then you’re almost guaranteed to sell more stuff along the way.

Put your heart in it first, and your pocketbook will benefit.

Photo: ollyy / Shutterstock