B2B Customer Relationship Management: Building a Customer Touchpoint Plan

B2B Customer Relationship Management: Building a Customer Touchpoint Plan

Last week, I talked about building a customer focused company. This week, I’d like to focus on customer relationship management and the types of touchpoints you should consider to develop the relationship.
So you’ve done the hard work of winning the customer over and delivering a product that hopefully has met their expectations. But what happens next?
Like anything, a business relationship requires maintenance. In a previous blog I wrote about how customer satisfaction isn’t the sole driver of retention and the importance of establishing a “Trusted Adviser” relationship. While measurement of satisfaction is an important step in keeping your customers happy, there are some important steps you need to take in order to build the relationship further.

Customer Relationship Management Techniques

1) Build automated marketing campaigns to share educational content with your customers.

As part of building the trusted adviser relationship, ensure your marketing department continues to reach out to your customer base with content that informs them of new products, changes in the business, and other industry-related advances.

2) Have your client service teams reach out on a fixed schedule.

Client service teams at Fidelity often reach out to their high net worth at least quarterly. The calls are typically ten minutes. The client manager asks a few simple questions:
“How are things going?”
“Has anything changed that requires us to rethink our portfolio strategy?”
“Have you thought about your positions for tax purposes?”
The customer’s responses to these questions gives the client service team member an opportunity to triage the customer’s needs and suggest solutions (up-selling). It also gives them a heads up on any potential issues in the customer’s world that they might need to address.
More importantly, it can be an opportunity to address any issues the customer has with the product or service they have received.

3) Leverage your content/social media strategy to help increase customer engagement.

This can be as simple as a newsletter that you send out to your customers. You can ask your audience to pose questions about your company, product, or future plans, and answer them either via social media or in the next newsletter to make it more interactive.
It can be as complex as a webinar to show useful product tips and/or a sneak peek of new products and features. Boeing for example, often makes their product designers available to their media teams to speak about their newest jets and coolest features. It’s often exciting for customers to have a “Behind the Scenes” look and learn more about your company.
These are just a few techniques you can use to help build a stronger relationship with your customers. Make sure your touchpoints are relevant and frequent, and always solicit feedback.