My son invited me to a wine tasting just before Christmas. It was a typical student thing - pay 5 pounds at the door, drink all you can and, if you do buy something, the 5 pounds is taken off your order. I should have known better but it was Christmas and I might well have found something I liked.
Well, I did; tasting in moderation and spending around a hundred pounds on half a dozen bottles of an Italian Valpolicella (am I the only one who remembers this once as a cheap tipple?) and a boutique gin by a company more famed for its potato crisps. I left poorer - sober and happy.
The happiness lasted a day; that is until I passed through the Channel Tunnel store in Folkestone. That same gin on offer at 35% less. A scandal. My misery continued when I checked out the price of the wine online. This time a slightly less annoying 30%. I attend a few tastings a year, not expecting to find many real bargains but certainly not expecting to be taken advantage of. My son offered little sympathy reminding me someone had to subsidise the many students who attended. Fair point.
My last tasting with that company. The end of a relationship before it had begun.
2012 dawned with a new lexicon in customer relationship management. Intimacy and Experience now prefaced Management as our new lingua franca. That Relationship word seemed to have lost its lustre. We saw Service Providers across the spectrum scramble to recruit leaders from other industries who seemingly knew how to manage intimacy and experience better than they did. Every second Linked-In Banner or pushed job advertisement seemed to scream out for these rare people. Impact analysis anyone?
It's been a little quieter lately. I have even heard of some of these new hires who have headed back to more familiar industries. What went wrong? Is it that the Service Provider industry is still "too hard to fix"? I think not. Is it unwilling or unable to raise its game? Again, a solid NO. Were these new gurus just emperors in new clothes? Perhaps, some were but many were not.
Making a company Truly Client Aware (TCA a new candidate TLA) is a transformational journey. It takes inspirational leadership but so much more. A company that is TCA just knows, in all that it does, how to work with and delight its clients. It takes hard work and an alignment of core systems and behaviours with stakeholder ambitions. It takes time and there is no quick fix. Any action can have a strong and unpredictable reaction. It's not only in Chaos Theory that we need to be always on our guard. Amazonian butterflies have much to answer for!
I have served my apprenticeship in the CRM solutions' business and, especially in the lightening age of social media, where brands can live and die frighteningly quickly, becoming TCA is what it's now all about. Smart companies will maintain their focus, even when the going gets tough.
I marked the New Year with a Martini made with that special Gin. Shaken by being gouged but stirred into wanting to work with others on how to manage the journey, and that is likely to begin with claiming back the Relationship word. After all, relationships grow with moments of sharing, listening and occasionally surprising. Thank You, Mr Bond.
Happy New Year.
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