Having an affair with a customer

Last week I happened to visit a mall & happened to overhear the conversation over the counter – “Find out who is the customer contact and see whether you can have an affair with her”. A senior colleague was suggesting a junior – who was trying to break an ice with a customer.

It sounded very funny to me. However, when went through deeply, it made sense. What teenagers/people do when they are in love? They try to find out every minute detail of the person they are in love with. He/she want to know what the other person’s likes/dislikes, hobbies, interests and what not? They approach the other person very carefully and treat them very important.

You know what? If we apply these principles or even 10% of these principles with our customers, our day is done. We get ideas to serve them better. When we serve them better, they obviously feel good and naturally come back to us. That is all what is relationship is about.

In the business language, having an affair with the customer is building good customer relationship. You might ask a question, what is IT has to do with customer relationship? My answer is most of it. You can capture all your customer information through the IT systems. They can help you get the single view of the customer, interests and what not? You can leverage IT to gather information and monitor the relationship. Here you go..

Reactive vs. Proactive IT

In most of the organizations today, business always drives what IT has to do. Business is always under the impression that IT solutions are costly and time consuming. To address the short term need, business always asks for the tactical /quick fix from the IT folks. Most of the time, IT department bends to the pressure. So, IT has been reacting to the business needs and trying to meet the ends.

One of the Management consulting firm partner comments on this game of alignment as –“ IT has a list of things it’s working on, perhaps with some subjective connection to business objectives, and a hurried business agrees that, yes, this is the right list.”

Question is how IT can be proactive & influence business? IT can get overall picture of the landscape of software, hardware, processes. If it focuses on improving the business processes / business efficiency, it can proactively suggest changes to business. Quantify the benefits in terms of response time, strategic business benefit, competitive advantage etc. Ask for business endorsement for these initiatives.

Forrester suggests “Business Focused Enterprise Architecture” for strategically aligning IT & business. According to this process, IT needs to
Ø Identify key outcomes
Ø Analyze outcome drivers
Ø Develop & propose concepts
Ø Incorporate into planning
Ø Build into “To be” architecture.

IT can become a strategic partner to the organization, only if it becomes proactive in its approach.