The Power of Relationship Assessments
by S4 Consulting
Customer relationship assessments provide critical information and actionable insights to generate revenues, increase loyalty, and establish a sustainable competitive advantage based on customer knowledge and intimacy. These insights can be translated into additional ways to protect, repair, and grow customer relationships.
Why do you need an account assessment?
We find that relationship assessments are the most effective diagnostic tool to determine the health of strategic account relationships, especially when the assessments are conducted by an objective third party.
Measuring and managing the health of strategic account relationships is a major challenge for executives leading business-to-business account relationships.
Executives and their strategic account managers know how important it is to have an ongoing listening and feedback system that will bring attention to any systems, processes or people that are not meeting the expectations of the strategic account.
Establishing effective listening and feedback systems with strategic accounts is challenging because there are typically multiple contacts on multiple levels in multiple departments. This situation leads to unexpressed malcontent, undetected problems and can exacerbate troubled relationships.
Why are assessment interviews the best option?
S4 Consulting has successfully conducted hundreds of relationship assessments over the past 25 years and we have found that interviews are the most effective way to obtain detailed, actionable and strategic information on your accounts’ philosophies, preferences, expectations, wants, challenges, needs and goals.
We recommend relationship assessments through a third party to:
- Learn more about your current relationship with each targeted account
- Understand the critical interactions you have with each account
- Determine what your internal stakeholders would like to learn from these accounts and how you might use the assessment information
- Encourage internal stakeholder buy-in to the account relationship assessment process
The most frequently used means to measure account relationship health is through satisfaction surveys, which are often perceived to be a waste of time and ineffectual because:
- Important questions are not asked
- Dissatisfaction can lead to incomplete participation
- Improvements are not implemented after results are compiled
Many times, people who are known to be very dissatisfied will refuse to complete a survey and their missing feedback skews the data. For example, an executive who will not take five minutes to complete a survey will often spend 45 minutes (or more) for an interview. Assessments have the power to reveal critical information that may not be expressed in a survey.
Third party interviewing as part of the relationship assessment can reveal negative issues that might have gone unreported to diagnose a troubled relationship. That information can be used to move forward and repair unhealthy relationships, or to foster the growth of a stronger, more successful relationship. Third party interviewers receive sensitive, important and insightful information that might not have been uncovered in a written survey.
