Relationship Value (RV) measures what matters in the Relationship Age, harvesting insights from the chaotic crush of Interaction Data coming off the Internet, smart mobile devices, Social Media, and Customer-Facing and Community Systems–making sense of Interactions, what people DO, tied to results.

High-level, strategic and operational RV Use Cases

1. Compete on unique relationships:                                                                          

Relationship Value unlocks the unique, sustainable competitive advantage that comes from understanding and acting on customer behavior and profit patterns better, faster, and more responsively than competitors do. When using RV, executives know how to repeat success.

With Relationship Value executives have Strategic Operational Control based on real-time, cross-functional Operational Data tied to individual contacts and real-time profit.

  • Instead of end-state and lagging indicators, executives manage looking forward with RV, a leading indicator for profit and satisfaction.
  • Instead of making decisions based on head count and allocated costs, they put variable costs where they belong–on the individual contact.
  • They rely on what individual people actually DO, not on aggregated trends of what people SAY they’ll do. With Relationship Value, frontline staff and their managers have real-time, cross-functional operational control. They see how deep a relationship is becoming across the customer lifecycle without getting buried in the Interaction details. RV measures whether the Interaction moved the relationship forward or backward and by how much.

2. Optimize customer outcomes with pattern analysis:

Both frontline staff and their managers use real-time Relationship Value pattern analysis to compare individual contacts to any aggregate and subsets within specific aggregates to easily see what is normal and manage to that normal, saving effort for the exceptions, the anomalies. Managers watch what is working in real time and make interim adjustments to the process.

 

Common Aggregates and Subsets:                                                                Event, Profit, Performance, and Stakeholder Community.

  • Event Subsets: Those who repeat, refer, up sell, cross sell, increase volume, have a bad experience, etc.
  • Profit Subsets: High Profit customers, Normal Profit customers, Poor Profit customers.
  • Performance Subsets: Team, industry, territory, contact source, company revenue, etc. By team particularly, either the entire Virtual Account Team that is handling the same set of customers across Acquisition/ Closing/ Retention Stages, or different reps within a stage handling different customers.
  • Stakeholder Community Subsets: Leaders, Doers, and Watchers in terms of their Community Engagement, then by Events as described above plus those who recommend, create, share, download, etc.

 

3. Compare competing business units, distributors, or partners:

Executives use Relationship Value patterns to facilitate confidential high-level coherent comparison of and communication about the depth of the relationships being developed by competing business units, distributors, or partners.

RV summarizes Interaction effectiveness. RV can be shared without compromising private information about the Individual Contact or exactly what Interactions the sales organization has had with that individual contact. Both the company and the sales organizations find out what they really need to know. The company knows the depth of the relationships being built on its behalf, and the sales organization keeps the details of the Interactions private.

4. Develop cross-functional best practices:

Managers compare RV patterns across industries, territories, product lines, regions, divisions, business units, etc. Correlate to profit and satisfaction. Drill down to compare RV development in customer lifecycle stages to develop best practices, allocate resources, tied to outcomes.

 

Narrowly-focused Tactical RV Use Cases   

Although these narrowly-focused use cases are written from a frontline-staff-and-their-managers- action perspective, they could be automated and presented to the user as a workflow stream.

1. Decide next best action for individual contact:

Assess an individual contact’s status and benchmark it against typical RV patterns in their Acquisition/ Closing/ Retention Stage. Decide what to do next to effect outcomes in the context of typical behaviors. Determine whether Interactions with higher or lower Interaction Cost per RV Unit are appropriate. Pay attention to the number of RV Units per Interaction with the individual contact. Select the appropriate Interaction sequence. RV shows at a glance how the individual contact arrived at the current position, and what could be done next.

2. Prioritize top priority contacts for specific treatment:

Select contacts for a specific treatment based on their RV relationship patterns relative to where they are in the customer lifecycle. Measure efficacy of A/B campaigns by resulting change in RV.

  • Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), with higher RV Units per Interaction and fewer Interactions, would get priority attention from Sales over others. All MQLs are not equal.
  • Stalled top priority customers, compared to norms, can be selected for a high-touch (high RV per Interaction) campaign to get them moving forward.
  • Interaction Cost per RV Unit in Retention identifies over- or under-investment in relationship development. Develop a normalizing strategy.

3. Prepare for up-sell/cross-sell in six months:

For upcoming planned renewals or up-sells, identify recent RV relationship patterns for current customers to ensure that sufficient relationship depth and satisfaction supports successful up-sell conversation. Take preemptive moves.

4. Emulate top team performance:

Compare the RV relationship patterns of the set of individual contacts managed by top performers to other team members to see how far off the norm they are. Identify Virtual Account Team reps that create the most effective RV relationship patterns with buyers, resulting in positive outcomes for the seller. Encourage collaboration among team members to try new approaches, to unleash the creativity of the team, and to improve the process ongoing. Develop cross-functional reward/recognition programs to promote long term value creation. Model best practices to emulate across the customer lifecycle. Consider gamification techniques.

 

Customer Experience Wisdom: Developing relationships is a team sport.

Questions: Can you repeat success?

Do you know why you are successful?

Can you measure it?

If not,

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