Customer relationships: the secret behind organic revenue growth.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

What if organic revenue growth and profitability are heavily a function of the quality of interactions between your bank and its customers? We could debate whether it is 25 percent or 50 percent or 75 percent of what matters; but, suffice to say that it affects customers' decisions to do more, or less, business with you. Since many customers are dealing with eight, 10 or even 15 different financial service providers, where they decide to allocate their business certainly has a bearing on wallet share and organic revenue growth.

Many factors impact these decisions: location/convenience, produces, price, brand, to name a few. Over time, winners and losers emerge as customers allocate their resources and their allegiance to different providers. Since the ability to change locations or products or price or even advertising is limited, the financial question becomes: How do we get the highest return on customer interactions possible--given the location, products, price and brand that we currently have? How do we give the most valuable interaction possible with the finite resources of time, energy, skill that we have?

The word "relationship" is often used to mean a number of things. I recently read an article that dismissed relationship selling, saying that customers are not looking for friends but for value. The assumption was that relationship was simply about being friends. Strong customer relationships are based on valuable interactions over time. Interactions that showcase competence, build trust and demonstrate commitment have very tangible value to customers--regardless whether the interactions are provided by tellers, service representatives in a call center, personal or private bankers.

Demonstrated competence results in better ideas, decisions and actions for the customer. If we believe in the value of competent medical staff or smiled athletes, it is not hard to believe in the value of sales and customer service professionals who navigate us to better and more efficient decisions and actions.

Dealing with someone you trust to tell you the truth, even when it is not to his/her advantage, saves us the time and tension of seeking alternatives to ensure we are not being taken advantage of. Think of how much time you spend in an average week validating information because you do not trust the source of what you are told. Relationship dishonesty and distrust are very inefficient.

And then there is the issue of commitment. Uncommitted...