by Griz

Created on: May 09, 2008

If you came here hoping for a bunch of management doublespeak, I'm sorry but I'll have to disappoint you. It's become the fashion to do business by formulas and justify it using words that sound good and have no meaning. This has resulted in faceless corporations that methodically devise new ways to get more of your money more often with no increase in value. You hear me oil companies? Utilities? Cellular providers? Can you hear me now?

Customer Relationship Management has a technical meaning, and it's well explained elsewhere. It reduces the fundamental business relationship, that of you with your customer, to a set of paradigms and algorithms and processes. It's cold and shallow and there's no better way to inform your customer beyond the shadow of a doubt that you couldn't care less about anything other than his wallet and his ability to take money out of it and hand it to you.

Take off your management hat for a moment and put on your regular person hat. When you walk into an electronics store, you cringe just like the rest of us as you scan the horizon for the inevitable incoming sales dweeb who is under strict orders to attack you the minute you cross the threshold. This has been standard practice since time immemorial in the retail business. Why? Because someone did a study that showed that stores that practiced this technique made more sales. Someone else turned that study into a seminar and began selling it to others. Like the taste map of the tongue or the idea that we only use ten percent of our brains, the idea becomes widespread and accepted, and now is rarely challenged. But it's a bad plan.

Customer relationship management (not capitalized) is simple. You don't need a book or a seminar or a consultant to tell you how to do it. Use your head. Customer relationship management is about one thing: the management of customer expectations.

When you exceed customer expectations in a positive way then you have a happy customer. If you set those expectations in the first place, it is easy to exceed them. Anyone who is a Star Trek fan remembers well the day that Scotty finally revealed his secret for performing miracles under fire. He explained that he simply doubles or triples the the amount of time something is going to take. Then when he says he can have the warp drives back on line in a half hour and Kirk say he needs them in ten minutes, Scotty winks at his crew and says, "I'll see what I can do, Captain." Scotty under-promised and over-delivered.

Of course

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