Imaginative Service: Making the Customer Your Partner

Who’s your banker, your insurance agent, or your mortgage lender?  If your answer is an institution, not a name, you are dealing with an enterprise that has replaced an important bond with a clerk or a call center. All that might be just terrific until your need is unique or your problem outside their script.  Then, you are left on your own and finding yourself cursing your way to the exit.

People don’t buy products and services; they buy the expectation of benefits and solutions they deem valuable.  Bundled with that value today is a long-term relationship, not a short-term transaction.  Customers as partners are more forgiving of error.  With a vested interest in your success, they spend more, purchase a wider array of stuff,  assertively advocate you more and offer suggestions for how you can get better.  What are you doing to make your customers feel like partners?