Customer Vendor Relationship Quotes

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

Empathy is an essential working and leadership capacity. If you are going to build strong relationships with your direct reports, peers, bosses, customers, and vendors, you must have the capacity to understand what other people are feeling and wanting. Business is replete with two-way transactions. In order to close a sale, you must understand your customer's needs. If you are leading people through a difficult change, you must understand how the change is affecting them if you are going to be able to lead them effectively.

Then you need to evaluate all the key relationships surrounding the business. Would you keep all your existing customers? Are you happy with your investors/bank? Are your vendors supporting you properly? Are your advisors — accountants, lawyers, consultants, and coaches — the best for the size of the organization and future plans? The toughest decisions to make are when the company has outgrown some of these relationships and you need to make changes.

The most vibrant platforms embrace third-party collaboration. The companies behind these platforms seek to foster symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationships with users, customers, partners, vendors, developers, and the community at large.

#8 Think about what running the business will mean on a day-to-day basis before you start. Every company has different challenges and different needs. A content site means writers, a distribution network, and ad reps. A shopping site means warehousing, customer service, and returns. A drop-ship site means managing remote vendors, outdated stocking information, and customer confusion. A directory site means lots of sales reps, a sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) system, recurring billing, and customer service people dedicated to helping vendors build their profiles. Manufacturing is its own can of worms. When you think about your company, think about the type of challenges you might face and ask if they are things you personally want to deal with. If yes, make sure you have a clear plan to overcome them and speak to other people in similar situations about their challenges and their solutions. #9

When I talk about kindness in business, a few people scoff. They say, “Steve Jobs and the leaders at Apple created a pressure-cooker environment but it produced category-defining products that people love and obsess over.” That is the point — the results are not worth the cost, because there is an alternative. The goal of TRM is to create a kind, sustainable, and fulfilling experience for everyone. Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only obsessive egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense. People are the most important resource for any business, and people — whether they are employees, vendors, or customers — respond best to kindness, respect, humility, and empathy. You never know what other people are going through in their lives. Many of us are under great stress, especially when business cycles shift and economic pressures build. Others are struggling in relationships. When everyone feels valued and heard, they are more likely to show up fully and bring their best each day. Kindness is the alternative to the unnecessary “business is war” analogies that are not only tiresome but borderline offensive. It is the opposite of the “outcome justified the means” mentality that drives many entrepreneurs to consider sacrificing everything (including their morals) to build $100 million businesses in seven years. It’s success without the collateral damage. This aspect of TRM creates a healthy framework for daily interactions and long-term goals and helps people avoid burnout even when they put in heavy hours over long periods of time. We are all naturally optimistic, motivated to be better tomorrow than we are today. A kind organization understands that and leverages it. Your goal is to build a product that lasts, but to do that, you must also build an organization, a work environment, and a fabric of relationships that last too. People will remain engaged and focused on achievements when they are doing something meaningful that they care about in an organization that lets them live the way they want to live. “Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense.

Retail managers know that while their official vendors are large multinationals like Procter & Gamble and Hindustan Unilever Limited, what they are actually dealing with is someone like ‘Agarwal & Gupta Distributors’, the RS of the MNC. And so, while a good relationship with HUL can be developed by promoting their products, the truth is that a good relationship with the RS can be developed mainly by promoting his working capital availability. The RS is not merely a supplier of goods. He is a vital link in the whole retail chain and can be underestimated only at one’s peril. This is exactly what one large retail chain figured out early, and used to get the most amazing competitive advantage. Supermarket retail has a built-in advantage not available to traditional retailers. On the buying end, they buy bigger quantities and get a substantial period of time to make payment to the suppliers compared to smaller retailers, who sometimes have to pay cash on delivery. On the selling side, no customer gets credit at a supermarket. You scan, you bill, you pay and go — that’s the supermarket way. For the kirana, however, most regular customers expect a ‘khata’, a monthly account. Kirana customers buy through the month and pay only at the end. Supermarkets, by design, therefore, buy on liberal credit and sell on cash. Therefore, they are ‘cash surplus’ on a day-to-day basis. Their competitors, the kirana stores, are not. This particular retailer decided to make the payment terms more favourable to the supplier. So where the industry practice was eight days, this retailer reduced it to four days. In effect, the retailer halved the credit period, thus influencing the vendor’s working capital availability favourably. The vendor, in turn, now had a stake in the retailer’s growth and continued prosperity. The relationship soon turned into a win-win partnership. The vendor developed ingenious ways to enhance the retailer’s market share in various catchments.

Today, the best businesses position themselves as “partners” with their customers, vendors, and suppliers. Instead of spreading their business over a large number of other companies, they consolidate their business with a single supplier with whom they work closely to develop high-quality relationships that lead to better quality, greater efficiency, and eventually, lower prices and higher profits for both parties.