Customer Relations

Skill #6: Develop new ideas that solve customer problems.

Skill #7: Cultivate your customers and their employees on every level of the organization.

Dwightknows that building relationships with customers is important but EC isglobal now and that personal connection seems to be shrinking. Onecustomer, in particular, is on his mind. The Sunny Dale Heath Center.One of EC’s firstclients, Sunny Dale Health Center came to Dwight and Ike to try tocreate a wheelchair that would fit the small hallways of the oldVictorian Home they used for their center. It was a great project andthe two owners really enjoyed getting to know them all, even theorderlies that pushed the patients. In fact, they were really helpfulbecause they explained some of the major problems, they had with manualwheelchairs. Ideas that led to the unique design of EC’s manual chairs.To this day Dwight and Ike stop by the center once a month on their wayto work to see how everything is going. Moreover, it is part of themission of the company to put their customer’s needs first. How can theydo that if they do not see them? So, the problem is how can we create this same approach with our global and national clients who do not live next door? Dwight also knows that this issue goes hand in glove with customer service. In fact, he recently read in an article from Byteagain,a major e-commerce consulting firm, that e-commerce is one of thebiggest believers in the idea that customer service is paramount todeveloping and keeping customers. These two facts amazed him: Over 50% of American consumers say they’ve scrapped a planned purchase or transaction due to bad service and 80% of businesses believe that they’re providing “superior” customer service, only 8% of consumers feel the same. There’s obviously a disconnect here.

Dwight,realizing that Inge is going to need a new manager for customer servicehas decided that he would like to see how you would tackle creating aplan to cultivate EC’s long-distance customers so that EC can betterevaluate their problems. Dwight also would like to see techniques foridentifying and solving their problems as well. Using the articles inthis week’s course material and research create an executive summary (of a virtual report) that addresses the following: