Quality of Relationship with Customers

Satisfying customer needs ensures the business survival for an organization. A periodical check is required to enhance the quality of services and product to build a quality relationship with customers. For fulfilling this goal organizations must have a set of rules to measure and improve this quality.

Delivering best quality services to customers is considered the most efficacious way to ensure that an organization stands out from a group of competitors and avail the privilege to be known as best among all. The main ingredients that are involved in a high quality relationship between customer and supplier are trust and commitment. Trust means confidence and security in any relationship and can be treated as the biggest investment in building long term relationships. Trust is developed between the two parties when they experience flawless and satisfied motives between each other. As a result of knowing more about each other, all the doubts and risks are minimized and leads to inevitably smooth business. Lack of trust, on the other hand, weakens the relationship foundation; as a result chances of uncertainty and conflicts increases.

Commitment is yet another milestone that should be achieved to set a long term mutual relationship. Commitment can only be attained when there is mutual trust and the two parties share each other’s values. In a committed relationship both suppliers and customers strive to uphold the relationship and never want to exit which in turn results in building the relationship stronger and sharper. There is, in fact, huge cost which is incurred in switching from committed relationships of one supplier and build new relationships with other suppliers from scratch.

There are other attributes as well which promote a high quality relationship, these include the following:

• Courtesy- Many times customers become irritated and uncivil due to some unpredictable reasons. But it is substantially important for supplier to keep his calm and deal accordingly. Delivering the responses in calm voice with courtesy and sympathetic sense could dramatically act as a catalyst in driving customer’s satisfaction.
• Availability- Manic customers always prefer human responses instead of electronic emails or messages. Hence, it is important for an organization to make its executives always available for customers for responding and dealing with customer queries and needs. Provision of these services always promotes emotional bonding between customers and suppliers which in the end is always fruitful and drives to profitable business.
• Responsive- The suppliers should always have prompt, responsive and experienced executives to serve customers. For example, if a customer calls and asks about some critical features of any product and the executive fails to explain it or being non-responsive to most of his questions then the customer could probably divert his way to some other organization for better response which could definitely result in end of the deal and relationship with that customer.
• Intelligent- Many customers are attracted towards good deals which consist of discounts and feasible prices. A supplier should be intelligent enough to deal with these situations and offer the best price and deal so that the customer is not lost to the supplier who is able to make some substantial profit if not more. This requires predefined strategies to be created and to respond intelligently towards fulfilling these strategies.
• Futuristic- Always be futuristic to technological changes. The strategies, types of services and products could gradually deteriorate with time due to huge competition and higher rate of technological changes. Keeping this in mind an organization should always focus on renovating business strategies periodically and convince the customers accordingly.

Inheriting the above quality attributes into business will always improve quality relationship between customers and suppliers and is always fruitful for both.