The network effect
The quality of the relationships that you build with your customers is critical to your organisation's future.
A business these days is never ever dealing with just one customer at a time.
When one customer receives amazing service, or when one customer contacts you with a complaint that you fail to resolve quickly and effectively - that experience, and the story of the experience, doesn't just end with that one customer.
Every one of your customers has the power to be your biggest public advocate or worst detractor.
Your customers themselves can be your very best marketing channel; having the ability to recruit, on your behalf, an army of new high-value customers.
Or the exact opposite - nullifying all of the hard work and well-intentioned marketing messages that you have spent whole budgets on getting out there.
You are never dealing with just one customer on the shop floor, or when that call comes through to the call centre.
Thousands of others are listening in too.
Hardly any businesses ever even consider, let alone measure, how this network effect, affects them.
But they absolutely should, because the quality of the relationships that you build with your customers (and indirectly with their network) is critical to your organisation's future.