In our last post, we introduced our 5 Pillars of Customer Happiness. This week, we’re digging into pillar number one: Treat Your Customers Like Partners.

People often say the key to driving customer happiness is to follow The Golden Rule. While I agree that treating your customers how you want to be treated is a good idea, to me it feels too much like table stakes to be considered "foundational."

For customer happiness to become a cultural pillar, you need to implement concrete practices around it. Choosing to treat your customers like partners takes you beyond common courtesy and deep into bend-over-backward-because-you-truly-care territory. You develop long lasting and mutually beneficial customer partnerships by aligning interests and building deep relationships of trust with them. Your partners can’t be successful without you, nor you without them.

You can earn the trust of your customers in many of the same ways you earn it from your team. But remember, trust doesn’t happen all at once. It is built over time, and requires constant reinforcement. I like to point to 3 easy-to-remember practices for aligning interests and building trust-based partnerships:

Know your customer

Eat your own dog food

Be transparent

A few years ago, I got to know a certain company very well - let's call it GreatSoft - which exemplified these principles. I think their story perfectly illustrates the importance of strong customer relationships.

Know your customer

In its formative years, GreatSoft’s product, engineering, and sales teams were judicious in building strong relationships with customers. The company took time to learn the ins and outs of the industry in order to better understand the mind of their end users.

They frequently sent representatives from every department to meet with and solicit feedback from users at every stage of the customer life cycle. They even spent time with customers who had churned away, in order to understand where they had failed, so they could improve and one day win them back. In time, GreatSoft, and many of the people who worked there, became known as influential thought leaders in their industry.

Eat your own dog food

GreatSoft also made a point of using their own software. This enabled them to broaden their understanding of the industry and to grok the underlying pain points their users encountered in doing their jobs. This helped their customer facing teams to build greater credibility with customers and earn their professional respect.

They even went so far as treating themselves like a customer for technical support, bug fixes, and feature requests. In so doing they subjected themselves to the exact same experience as their customer. This helped them to identify weaknesses in their onboarding and support processes and quickly improve things when they found points of friction.

Be Transparent

They also made a point of not only sharing the product roadmap but also their entire product design strategy. Doing so helped them to be more efficient in prioritizing product features across their rapidly growing customer base. Aside from being open about the direction of the product, they also made it a point of company pride to talk about where they wanted to take the business over time. This included how they saw their business growing with their customers.

It also meant they were transparent about their financial objectives. That level of openness made talking about money much easier and kept their customers from feeling like an ATM.

In a few years GreatSoft became the dominant brand in it’s niche. They were the best at what they did, had built rock-solid customer relationships, and were minting money.

And then they blew it.

Within a couple years of reaching its zenith of success, GreatSoft found itself hemorrhaging customers and revenue, not to mention many of its best employees. In the end it was sold for a fraction of its former value to a younger competitor who migrated the remaining customers to their own platform and shut down GreatSoft’s product. WTF?!

A few themes surfaced when I spoke with insiders and former customers about why the company had failed. One telling piece of customer feedback reads:

“When we first signed up with GreatSoft, it felt like we were partners. The guys were responsive and genuinely interested in our business. They charged a premium but we felt like it was worth it. By the time we switched providers, GreatSoft had become a totally different place. It was like Jekyll and Hyde.”

In the minds of customers and employees, things fell apart when the company’s leadership allowed the culture to shift away from customer relationships and product innovation. The result was that the product quickly fell behind, and customers lost faith in the company’s ability to deliver more than the next invoice.

Don’t let this be you. Build your business around the principle that your customers are important partners. Strong partnerships built on trust are your greatest insurance policy against failure.

Our next piece on customer happiness will focus on the third pillar: managing expectations. Until then, we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on managing customer relationships. You can send us an email, or shout at us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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