An automotive manufacturer gets supplies for their vehicles from all over the world.  They have arrangements, service level agreements, expectations for timing and quality of all the parts.  And when they gather all these supplies, they assemble the cars.  They test the cars.  Then they take pictures of those cars, and they put them in glossy brochures to aid sales.  To sell the cars in the end, the manufacturer relies heavily on the suppliers in the beginning.

In our world of customer service, client retention, and fan renewals and growth efforts, we’re not manufacturing a vehicle.  We are building a relationship.  And we have a lot of suppliers of information regarding the customer.  There’s internal data we have on customers, including work orders, purchase patterns, and service histories.

Your BEST Supplier

But the greatest single source of information about the customer is…the customer.  There’s nobody who knows the customer better than the customer themselves.  Fortunately, we have innumerable opportunities to utilize this supplier.  Every communication we have with them is an opportunity for us to document some intelligence on the supplier.  Every email we get from them, every text they send – these are sources of intelligence.

One source that the vast majority of companies underutilize is research.  Many companies don’t survey their customers, and even more don’t track and append those results to the individual customer.  They’re not utilizing that information in future conversations.  They’re not tapping into that supply of information when looking to increase sales, when trying to renew an annual agreement, when sending an email to make it look more personalized – and less like a generic marketing campaign.

With customers being the greatest supplier of information you need to keep them and build your relationship with them, be intentional about how you acquire that information.  Document and utilize what the customer supplies to you to better serve them.

Use the customer as the best supplier of the information you need to build a long-term relationship with them.

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