How You Can Help Them

They don't start out by saying, Do you want 133 MHz or 200 MHz? They start by asking what you need to do. That's fundamentally an interactive process.

You can create this interaction any number of ways. The trick is to find the one approach that works best for you. The phone, for example, is very effective. The bandwidth is high, you can read voice inflection, and data capture is good because a customer service agent punches everything in. But the phone is also a very expensive tool.

The Web offers an increasingly effective way to interact. When you interact on the Web, the cost to the supplier is zero. Nothing. Compare that with the phone: Every time you call Federal Express and ask them to track your package, your call costs them $2 to $3. They lose money on that package. But when you go to their Web site and track the package yourself, they make money. The more people use the Web site, the more cost-efficient the business becomes.

Do you keep your customers?

You never want to turn a customer loose. If you're a home builder and I come to you to build my house, you know that I'm also going to need an architect, a realtor, a lawyer, an insurance agent. You can't deliver those services. But it would pay you to have alliances with other high-quality companies and professionals who could deliver those services. That way you continue to own the relationship.

You have to be on top of what the customer wants. Customers are diverse and dynamic -- their tastes and needs change from day to day and even hour to hour.

The more you customize your product or service, the more marketing becomes part of customer service -- and the more customer service becomes part of marketing. You erase the distinction between getting a customer, keeping a customer, and growing a customer.

If you want to do a good job of acquiring new customers, you can hire a marketing director or an ad agency. No problem. But if you want to do a better job of keeping your customers longer and growing them into bigger customers, there's nobody you can hire to do that. It has to permeate your organization. It has to become a way of doing business.

Do you organize around customers?

Most companies aren't organized for this new way of working and don't have anyone in charge of making it happen. But the firm of the future will be organized around individual customer relationships.

You may not be able to make that change overnight. But you can start by identifying your highest-value customers and putting somebody in charge of them. That's an incremental step, but it speaks to three issues: organization, time, and money. As long as no one is responsible, no one is going to have the money or find the time. But if you put someone in charge, you'll make more money, and suddenly you'll also find the time.

Some people ask, Do our customers really want this? That's really old thinking! The fact is, customers want different things. Some really want this kind of individualized service. Others don't. Some will always award contracts strictly according to bids: they don't want a relationship with you. Others will gladly off-load functions to you if you perform them competently -- and will remain loyal to you forever.

You have to think of customers as individuals. Once you start to think that way, you realize that your business is your customer, not your product or service. A great customer relationship gives you long-term business. The simple truth is, any company that can't identify its customers individually is going to be history.

Don Peppers (peppers@marketing1to1.com) started Marketing 1:1 in 1992, after a career in direct marketing, finance, and business development in industries ranging from oil to airlines.