Customer Relationships

This building block defines the type of relationship you will have with each of your customer segments or how you will interact with them throughout their journey with your company. There are several types of customer relationships:

 

• Personal assistance: you interact with the customer in person or by email, through phone call or other means.
• Dedicated personal assistance: you assign a dedicated customer representative to an individual customer.  
• Self-service: here you maintain no relationship with the customer, but provides what the customer needs to help themselves.
• Automated services: this includes automated processes or machinery that helps customers perform services themselves.
• Communities: these include online communities where customers can help each other solve their own problems with regard to the product or service. 
• Co-creation: here the company allows the customer to get involved in the designing or development of the product. For example, YouTube has given its users the opportunity to create content for its audience. 

You can understand the kind of relationship your customer has with your company through a customer journey map.  It will help you identify the different stages your customers go through when interacting with your company, and it will help you make sense of how to acquire, retain and grow your customers.