Building Relationships With Customers

If you develop a relationship and trust with your customer and they will help you build your business.

Back when I was in the food business (Greenfield Healthy Foods (91-97) and privately owned (before Campbell Soup bought us) we would spend a tremendous amount of time interacting with our customers. We were the first to develop and nationally distribute a line of "better for you" snack foods. This earned us many big fans and often times real vocal critics.

People want to be heard. Well, most of us anyway and there are ones out there that demand it. Each day I would plow through all our mail from consumers and personally answer many of them. The rest I would have our customer service representative or sales people handle. The mail ranged from tremendous praise to unmentionable threats. I often wondered why people would go to such lengths to communicate with a company over a silly cookie or brownie. Needless to say, it was important enough for them to write and we treated each one very thoughtfully.

We had a policy that everyone who wrote us would get real samples (not coupons) of our latest product. The more you were unhappy, the bigger the box you received. We would send our freshest product with many new flavors and of course a personal note from one of our executives (and we all wrote them). We let the customer know they were heard and rewarded them for providing feedback. Many times we would get second and third letters back from these customers, thanking us and providing us even more feedback on our products.

Once we felt we had a good repore with a customer, we would occasionally ask them a favor. You see, were were a pretty aggressive young company and needed to extend our distribution. We knew that in many chains when a store manager received a request from a local customer that they had to reply to it. We would write to our customer and include several boxes of product, but this time we would ask them to bring it to one of the local supermarkets where they shopped (and where we did not have distribution). This tactic would work like a charm for us. We had a real customer, who was passionate about our product make a heart felt pitch directly to the store manager. In some cases we received calls from the store manager seeking to carry the product or we would get a call from a headquarters buyer directly.

The experience taught me a tremendous amount about consumer behavior and how to benefit from your customer relationships. Most importantly, I learned that a relationship is not something which can be contrived from a single promotion. You need to make the effort to establish a genuine connection and develop a trust. After that you can have a lot of fun together. JR

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