Customer Relationships: It's All Personal

It's a fact: companies with poor customer relationships not only lose customers but lose profits. Figuring out what's wrong with a company's customer relationships isn't all that complicated—just look at the way people handle their personal relationships, say Suzanne Baldino Jones and Mark W. Heisler co-authors of the new book, "From CellMates to SoulMates: Integrating Sales and Service." "The entire business of selling and servicing customers abounds with expressions of love and lust; think about it: customer prospecting is one big dating scene." says Baldino Jones. "As in personal relationships, customers want honesty, trust and respect and if a sales person is not able to deliver these values, the customer will look for love somewhere else," continues Jones.

Even when a salesperson is successful, customer relationship problems can arise. "The real complications begin once the sale is made and the customer is handed off to the service side of a business," adds Heisler. If something goes wrong, customers can quickly feel abandoned. "The sales person is nowhere to be found because they are out looking for another date and the service people don't know what sales promised," says Heisler. "It's like the customer goes to bed with Mel Gibson and wakes up next to Hannibal Lector," adds Baldino Jones.

Many customer relationship problems can be attributed to the "bad blood" between sales and service. Sales and service tend to work at cross-purposes: they don't share the same goals, communicate or coordinate work. Baldino Jones asks, "How can a company maintain healthy and profitable relationships with customers when those responsible for the customer (sales and service) are immersed in a dysfunctional relationship of their own?"

Baldino Jones and Heisler tackle customer relationships problems by patching things up between sales and service. "But don't make the mistake of thinking the solutions are a whole lot of psychobabble," says Heisler. He concludes this way, "We don't use ink-blots or couches. Everything we recommend in the book is designed to synchronize sales and service interactions around customers, so in the end companies achieve greater profitability."