Practices for better Customer Account Delivery & Relationship Management

Customer is an important role in any kind of business. Customer is the one who agrees to buy products and/or services the vendor offers. The organizations improve their business verticals by generating revenue through the customers to keep running their operations & stay in market. Many organizations may not exists without their customers. The better an organization can manage the relationships with its customers, the more successful, profiting & growing it would be in the market.

Repeating business usually becomes backbone of the organizations. The statistics from the practical analysis & different sales experts reports proved that big turnover of the revenue for an organization is coming from existing customers. Finding new customer accounts in the market for business growth also looks to be tough job than getting more business from the existing one thru maintaining good business relationships. Existing customers would also help in cross-selling to generate more profit. So It looks very important for Customer Account Delivery & Relationship Manager / Customer Facing Consultant (CFC) to design methodologies for keeping good customer relationships especially for the vendor organizations offering the IT services for their business growth.

Few Traits/Practices are briefly described below for Customer Account Delivery & Relationship Manager / Customer Facing Consultant (CFC) from Vendor organization to run the customer account in a more better & profiting way through achieving good customer relationships (focused IT Projects but can work elsewhere too accordingly). However it may vary from situation to situation, and this list still may have room for more.

While working directly with the Customer, the very first goal for the vendor/CFC is to methodically focus on how to Win the Trust through knowing the customer’s winning criteria especially if it is the first business engagement with that customer, it must be earned through smart planning, making efforts in right directions and aligning the executions towards customer satisfaction. For achieving this goal, the CFC first need to be well aware of customer organizational values & make sure the 100% compliance with them with no bickering. The process oriented large & mature organizations usually have lesser-to-zero tolerance on this point, and it may lead to downgrade the vendor’s rating even.

While providing IT Services especially on support projects and being the first facing contact person, the CFC must be easily & quickly Reachable on whatever the way customer likes (Email/Phone/IM), and sometimes even in off-business-hours too. Usually, the gaps in the methodologies of acknowledgement/availability, negligence etc. (especially in case of SLA) can cause the escalations on even small business issues followed by damaging the trust relationship with customer in some way.

The CFC must have excellent skills in managing the emails since the exchanging email is usually the most common & professional way of communications especially in IT industry. The CFC should be capable to manage ALL the email threads of ALL the customer projects simultaneously & respond emails respectively (if required), and no email should be missed. While working with big customer accounts on multiple projects, teams, threads, issues, critical monitoring etc. responding without extensive care can cause mixing of the threads/context which can cause to big information breaching or losing a customer account even, or can lose the trust at least. One the other hand, responding with incomplete analysis & information gaps would just be demeaning the CFC’s professional maturity followed by damaging the confidence. Customer emails must be responded very carefully with 100% accuracy & double check.

The CFC may have frequent interactions/meetings based upon project needs & sometime with top senior management from customer organization, the CFC should have well enough convincing skills and can sell his ideas/thoughts to manage all the situations going through in overall course of engagement execution.

While working with mature & IT aware customer accounts especially on software support projects, staying honest & unbiased would add a great value to the customer trust and help in maintaining the good relationship. At times, trying to hide obvious mistakes or becoming biased / defending the wrong by CFC usually doesn’t help, rather it can break the customer’s trust altogether, so these situations should be dealt with by fixing immediately, instead of hiding and/or defending.

Some customers might have repugnant behavior & may become rude very quickly even on small issues which may get under your skin because of their “stick to my guns” principle, the CFC should also be experienced/business focused enough to keep away the emotions on these situations since emotions driven decisions might kill the business altogether sometimes.

Specially in the long customer engagements with frequent customer meetings and day to day discussions, the CFC should never participate in discussion on controversial topics other than business interest (if any) e.g. politics/social/religion etc. and never show up inclined towards any side on these to avoid the unnecessary disagreement with customer with no business reason.

The CFC should keep improving the services to the customer, even low priority issues reported by customer shouldn’t be ignored & solution executions must be done through thinking wide & by putting himself in customer’s shoes to solve their problems as per actual business needs proactively by going beyond the IT industry limitations even at times.

The CFC usually acts like bridge between customer & delivery team, so he should be good project delivery & people manager to execute end-to-end implementation & production deployments on time through the delivery team.

Sometimes, the CFC can give favor/space to the customer by hiding customer’s minor mistakes especially in front of big audience in case customer is not very much intellectual / not fully aware of their requirements etc. Rather, the CFC should cash these situations to sell more better solution through smart ideas & mature consulting methodologies by using them for getting more business opportunities.

Specifically in onsite engagements, time to time small manageable investments on Customer (if possible) in controlled and repeated way in the form of Time (status meetings, overall potential improvements etc.) and Money (offering a lunch / coffee depending on customer’s liking / availability etc.) can also contribute a little bit to get a Return in the form of good relationship, but may not work, rather should be avoided in some situations.

On Time quality focused Deliverables - One of the biggest & most important point for making good customer relationship is to release quality deliverable on/before time to make sure customer’s business up & running smoothly, and never miss any commitment/deadline. To make sure on-time deliveries, always be smart enough for accurate, controlled, risk-managed & justifiable timelines by keeping in mind the past experience of IT project dynamics, technology exposure & consulting industry challenges etc. One rule can work in most of the project executions is “Under Commit - Over Deliver”. To make accurate timelines with quality, the customer requirements must also be pretty much clear & freeze up-to some level if possible. Making tight, unrealistic and unjustified timelines (with no special business reason and) with NO on-time deliveries in the end usually don’t help in making customer happy, rather it can destroy the previous trust and efforts followed by demeaning of CFC’s professional maturity & capability. On the other hand, making realistic, controlled commitments and on time (sometimes before time) deliveries with additional features if possible can add tremendous value in keeping great relationship. An aggressive focus on this point by CFC can open future potential business opportunities.

Making great things happening once or then may not work, it’s the Consistency & Determination in all above points with lesser-to-zero compromise for keeping & maintaining good relationships to producing more business from the same customer account for the vendor organization.