Managing the New Customer Relationship: Strategies to Engage the Social Customer and Build Lasting Value

Marketing has changed fundamentally in the last few years and has become an entirely new discipline, one that focuses on a new customer and a new relationship, framed by new principles, strategies, processes, roles and tactics. Individual customers are economically targeted and served, and treated as segments of one rather than members of a target market. Word of mouth and recommendations are vital as customers influence one another more than a company can do within its own advertising or customer dialogs. Today’s customer is always online, accessible and connected. Now marketing is not only direct and customer-specific but a continuous process by which companies seek to engage customers and be progressively more relevant, attractive and valuable. This is the era of a new customer relationship—an individual relationship that is social, mobile and local, influenced by peers and shaped by cognitive, behavioural and social psychological principles. New techniques, processes and technologies transform what it means to implement marketing strategy and achieve improved business results.

The new customer relationship requires that even those companies that have embraced customer relationship management ought to reassess their customer management. Now every marketing decision, whether online or in the physical world, whether of a technological nature, whether it affects customer experience, communications, dialogs, teaching or organizational memory, every decision should be seen through a single lens focused on the individual customers who matter most. Managing the New Customer Relationship provides a strategic and practical guide to help companies attract, develop, sustain and build more valuable relationships by:

• Expanding upon existing customer relationship management theories, concepts and methods to make these considerations more useful, strategic and contemporary
• Recognizing the profound importance of social media and how to plan customer engagement in the social context of each customer
• Exploring new technologies that offer new opportunities for engaging customers, including mobile, local, the cloud and customer analytics
• Demonstrating how to develop customer-specific understanding, predict what customers will want next, and how to manage each individual customer, and
• Offering perspectives to help the organization endure by focusing a chain of relationships on the end customer and creating meaning for stakeholders that can make relationships more intense and robust.

Managing the New Customer Relationship is for organizations of all sizes in all industries, for private- and public-sector organizations and not-for-profits. In short, every organization can apply the new principles, strategies, techniques and technologies discussed here to recognize important marketplace changes, plan to improve relationship and financial results and capture new shareholder value from new customer relationships.

About the Author

Ian Gordon is a management consultant with over thirty years of marketing and strategy experience. He is president of Convergence Management Consultants in Toronto, Canada, where he heads the Relationship Marketing-CRM practice, assisting clients to develop customer acquisition and relationship management strategies. He has worked with companies such as Alcan, Amadeus, Apple, Bell Canada, Canada Post, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak, Ethyl, Experian, Ford Electronics, General Electric, Goodyear, HP/Compaq, IBM, Kodak Canada, MasterCard, Microsoft, Mitel, NCR, Nortel Networks, Ontario Power Generation, Parker Hannifin, RBC, Thomson Reuters, Toshiba, Westinghouse and Xerox.

Ian is author of three previous books including the best-selling Relationship Marketing: New Strategies, Techniques and Technologies to Win the Customers You Want and Keep Them Forever (John Wiley & Sons Canada, 1998). He was the founding president of the Association for the Advancement of Relationship Marketing, and a past president of the Industrial Marketing and Research Association of Canada. He has lectured in relationship marketing, CRM and other marketing courses to undergraduate and MBA university students for over 20 years.