Relationship-centric companies are those organizations that, while focused on the delivery of their unique products and services, are chiefly interested in establishing and nurturing business relationships with strategic business affiliates and end-customers.
To leverage fully a relationship approach, a company must ensure that the individual interactionsthat make-up those relationships are appropriately branded, contextually relevant and personalized to the end-user, and they must also be delivered consistently across multiple channels.
Such an approach to relationships and interactions enables highly dynamic and recombinant business offerings which are driven internally and through strategic relationships. These offerings are made up of the unique and targeted configurations of products, services, terms and conditions that a company brings to the market through its business and marketing relationships and delivers to their customer base; building value on both sides of the relationship chain.
By looking at specific examples from different verticals, it can be seen that while particular industry goals might be widely divergent, the underlying opportunity of a relationship-centric business pattern, and the ability to fully leverage affiliate relationships, is common and quantifiable across many modes of operation.
ecommerceAmazon.com is best known as an ecommerce company that began as an online bookstore and later diversified by adding a broad variety of offerings. However, Amazon does not limit themselves to the descriptions of being an ecommerce company or an online retailer. Their vision statement confirms their dedication to a relationship-centric business pattern, claiming that they strive "to be earth's most customer centric company."
Amazon maintains long-term relationships with its end-users through a powerful, unified multichannel platform and website “…where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” They clearly manage a vast ecosystem of business affiliates; supply a highly personalized end-user component (the website) based on previous history and behavioral predictions; and recombines their offerings in ways that suit ever-changing market conditions. Behind all of this is a massive infrastructure of technology assets, databases and applications that facilitate these business relationships with both their customers and their affiliate partners.
Performance MarketingRapp Collins Worldwide is one of the world's leading direct marketing and customer relationship management agencies, providing services for the planning and implementing of integrated marketing campaigns including direct mail, television, telemarketing and interactive media. Firmly ensconced between their customers (product and service companies with offerings), end-users (the desired customers) and a host of suppliers (every other organization that plays a role in the relationship), Rapp Collins is more than just a performance marketer—they are in the business of facilitating interactions that support and inform all manner of relationships.
As such, the company has articulated their understanding of and commitment to relationship-centrism through what they call the ConsumerScape, the "new" marketing relationship between company and customer where the customer is in control by virtue of being able to block and opt-out of unwanted offerings.
Within this new environment Rapp Collins has begun "deepening the connection between consumers and brands" by marrying new thinking with new technologies to create "individual touchpoints that give consumers more ways to respond than ever before."
Subscription ServicesDIRECTV delivers satellite-based television subscription services and equipment to US home consumers and business services to an eclectic base of organizations including bars, restaurants, hotels, dorms, and hospitals as well as mobile solutions for cars, boats, RVs and aircraft. DIRECTV’s compelling mix of content, technology and service represents a significant investment in technology assets and sophisticated processes that inform and shape the relationships that exist between the company and its numerous business affiliates and service providers, support centers, order processing and delivery agencies, and 16+ million US customers.
To support the effort of offering "a seamless viewing experience" to their customers, DIRECTV must efficiently manage numerous interactions between multiple relationships that require unique business processes, branding variations, and instant, reliable connections between business partners and back-office systems, including complex satellite monitoring capabilities. And in their extremely competitive market space, DIRECTV must be able to accommodate frequent change, as market conditions demand, to a massive infrastructure of complex and interrelated technology assets that all affect the delivery of the service. DIRECTV’s interaction with the customer includes web, retail and contact-center interactions.
Financial ServicesBarclays PLC, one of the fastest growing credit card issuers in the U.S., operates on this simple premise: "anticipate the needs of…customers and clients, then serve them by helping them achieve their goals." Quite rightly, the financial services giant recognizes the need for, and represents a textbook example of a relationship-centric company.
The relationship with end-customers, the card holders, is an obvious area of focus for Barclays. These customers demand immediate response to their needs, in any channel they prefer, and full, flexible access to their account information.
Equally important to Barclays are the more than 40 existing card partnerships with some of the most successful travel, entertainment, automotive, educational and financial companies. These business affiliate relationships each carry their own unique rules for application processing, decisioning, and relationship management—and interactions with end-customers must be consistently delivered through each customer touchpoint, whether self- or full-service.
Companies such as US Airways, AirTran Airways, Carnival Cruise Lines, TiVo, Gulf Oil, and UBS rely on Barclays to manage numerous, substantial customer relationships with account holders for whom their service personnel interact in multiple communications channels, and with disparate systems, to provide information and process requests according to the affiliate’s requirements.
ManufacturingPerhaps less obviously than services-based industries, manufacturing organizations are very much relationship-centric enterprises as well. They have end-users in the sense of final consumers of their manufactured goods, and they almost certainly have end-users in the sense of suppliers, resellers, wholesalers, retailers, logistics and delivery partners, etc. And, in order to differentiate themselves from their competition, they will strive to make sure those relationships are as informationally rich as possible, contextually appropriate to each end-user, and consistently accurate.
Harley Davidson, the immensely popular US manufacturer of motorcycles and the nation’s #1 seller of heavyweight motorcycles, is also fully committed to the relationship management pattern by being "dedicated to creating experiences and developing relationships with all…stakeholders – customers, employees, investors, suppliers, governments and society." Described as "The Family," Harley Davidson's universe of relationships spans customers, suppliers, dealerships and their own employees to include every possible entity in the lifecycle of motorcycle manufacturing, purchasing and ownership. The company views their dealerships as "starting points and destinations," rather than simply a place to buy a motorcycle, for a long-lasting relationship that is centered on trust and dependability. In this way Harley Davidson recognizes the difference between simply making and selling motorcycles and developing long-lasting business relationships, and therefore promotes the relationship-centric enterprise.
