Are Your Customer Relationships Driving Business Success?

The word customer derives from "custom," meaning "habit," and typically refers to a current or potential buyer or user of a product or service: someone who "frequents" a "shop" to make it a "habit" to "purchase" there rather than elsewhere.

Earlier this year I spoke to some MIT Leaders of Global Operations (LGO: lgo.mit.edu) students about the difference between "customers", “clients", "buyers", and "purchasers”, who they think their customers are and how understanding their customers can be pivotal for their roles and careers.

About a month ago I was reminded by Prakash Balebail of Estuate (www.estuate.com), a business partner I had the pleasure of working with while at IBM, how relationships with customers not only can indicate and drive the success of a company, but can be an identity differentiator (how others remember them with).

"All you need to remember are two things about my company," says Prakash contently, "every customer is reference-able and every customer is a repeat customer."

Isn't that something?

For Estuate to achieve this, the Estuate team has to bring significant value to their customers. Customers “value” what is different (be it service, be it product, and be it price if nothing else), and Estuate stays true to its motto: Extreme service.

Of course building an identity (of Extreme service) is not about what you say, but about what you do and the assessments that is triggered. It is about how customers perceive how they are greeted at the first meeting, about how their issues and problems are handled with professionalism, and about how they feel the door is still open for future business even after they decided to go with someone else for the time being... and throughout this journey, the customer needs perceive and value your difference. All of this assumes there is a compelling offer: in Estuate's case, partnerships with Oracle (http://solutions.oracle.com/partners/kini) and IBM (http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2/lowerdatabasecosts/estuate.html), as well as team's deep experience form the Estuate edge.

The perceived difference that is valued (by the customers) is referred to as marginal utility in economics. Marginal utility doesn’t stay… competitors are there to neutralize marginal utility all day long. So to stay competitive in the game (to continue to have customers "frequent" your shop), one has to continue to identify the new marginal utility, perhaps instead of trying to figure out why something that used to work no longer works.

So... what is your Marginal Utility to your customers? How do you plan to continuously improve it to drive success?