In the B2B Services environment, developing meaningful client and customer relationships should be paramount to your company’s strategy.

Here are 3 principles that may help get you there:

1: Take a Total View of the Customer Relationship (Holistic View)

Everyone in your organizations needs to have a Total View of your client/customer relationships. That means they need to know the depth of the customer relationships down to the unique business units and customer departments that you do business with. All levels of management, customer service and delivery personnel should, at the very least, be cognizant of these relationships. Senior leaderships drive this thinking. Basically, taking a total view approach means looking through the eyes of your customer.

For instance; How deep do these relationships go? How do the relationships with one business unit or department effect and/or influence the relationships with other business units or departments?

Understanding who your clients are, and who their customers are and what their primary and tertiary objectives are is fundamental to taking a total view approach. How can you, as the service provider/partner improve your client’s customers experience? What are the individual roles/functions within your client organization and how do those individuals contribute in the team context to the business unit and/or department?

Your firm’s delivery personal, customer facing reps and management need to deep dive into what really makes the relationship work and continually improve.

2: Understand and manage expectations: What is required by the client, how is it required, why is it important and how will it impact both organizations? What are we really delivering? What does the client need and what do they expect on a daily, weekly, monthly basis from our service offerings? Which challenges do they face that we can realistically address?

Discussing these questions with your clients is a good first step in jointly establishing the right set of expectations for performance delivery of your products & services, personnel and technology.

Once those expectations are established, a robust way to measure and track performance is usually a good idea. The more transparent and open this process is the better. Having the right metrics and a way to report those findings is key to adjusting and tweaking service delivery to your clients.

There are multiple software tools out there which can be embedded into your systems that can help you establish metrics and report on those as necessary.

3: Communicate, Communicate Communicate:

Having effective feedback loops through all depths and levels of the relationship is paramount. It’s a key way to keep the relationship going.

Tying this all together and in summary, organizations have had success using methodologies such as Kaizen and Kaizen Quality Circles. to establish and maintain deep customer relationships in the B2B Services Environment.