Customers and employees: the power of knowing their stories.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Customer relationship management - Viewpoint essay

I received a call from a man about leasing some properly that has been in my family. I had never met him, but he mentioned bow he had admired my mom in some lease dealings he had with her after my dad passed away. Afterward. I got to thinking about how this small detail softened and mellowed our negotiations as I went back and forth with this stranger in finalizing our deal.

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What was it that made the difference? I concluded that the single element that mattered most was that in knowing my mom, he knew something about me. He not only knew of me but he knew my story. He knew where I came from--literally and figuratively. That such a small thing made a material difference signifies how much things have changed in recent decades. Many of us grew up with a larger "relationship infrastructure"--that is a relational support system of people who knew us, cared about us, and who shaped our lives in some way--than we have now.

We grew up in communities where most of our interactions were with people we knew. We mainly had two-parent families, usually surrounded by extended family, members. (In the 1850s 70 percent of people over 65 lived with their kids; by the 1990s 70 percent lived alone.) We lived next to neighbors, went, to school with students and teachers, transacted with shop owners and bankers--who knew us and knew our unique story.

The contrast with today is vivid. We are surrounded by strangers. Mostly those we transact with do not know us and more importantly, they do not know our defining story. They do not know the hardship, the accomplishments, the areas of service and sacrifice, the things we have overcome, our hopes and worries. This stale of "no relationship" exists between providers and their customers and between workers and their bosses.

Banks and other organizations have developed elaborate and sometimes oppressive profiling processes with customers to help uncover opportunities to sell more products. These processes are designed to develop sales but not necessarily relationships. Internally they have developed personnel files, skills inventories and work histories designed to help manage worker performance and placement but little to develop the relationship. They collect more and more information online through electronic questionnaires, but they learn less and less about people's personal story. Technology changes both the content arid the process of information gathering in a way that limits the sharing...