Relationship Management - Life is a series of experiences...

In a world where we're 140 (or less) characters away from venting our emotions on social media, the way in which a business manages it's customers has never been under more scrutiny. Traditionally, this would be done through relationship management, with a view to making sure the right message hit the right people, at the right time. It would be changed every time so as to be topical, inviting and engaging. But this meant something slipped the net. What about all the little things that happen in a relationship? Isn't it all the little moments that decide whether it can be sustainable in the long run? From here, a new thought process emerged - experience management.

While the concept of experience management is far from new, it has only recently become an area of key focus for business - particularly in relation to social media. In 1998, Pine and Gilmore hypothesized the idea of the "The Experience Economy", building on existing theory and bringing it to the attention of a wider audience. They would go on to demonstrate how this worked through examples such as the Rainforest Cafe, where the whole point of the restaurant was to take you on a journey that stimulated all senses. The food wasn't anything particularly special, but the experience created by the environment made it so. In time, this lead to widespread re-focusing on creating a unique experience dependent on the product or service offered. Not only was it about how businesses wanted to be seen, it was about how they could be touched and interacted with. Below, is the diagram as used by Pine and Gilmore;

The key task is identifying your type of offering, and providing an experience which matches this well. Understandably, this can present a real challenge - often because this varies from consumer to consumer. For example, not everyone likes their bank to run adverts about them being out and about in the community helping educate small business, because it's making them feel actively involved with an industry that has had it's share of bad news. But then there are those who expect this as a form of corporate social responsibility, and will be disappointed if their bank don't help out. Should they aim for the active participation of their customers in the educational sense, or look to provide more of an esthetic and passive offering to the market?

The answer to this scenario was usually by making a binary choice - ignore them, or compromise.

The business could choose whether they would stick to their guns on the message they sent out, and trust that the right followers would come (the Field of Dreams approach), or compromise, and never really satisfy anyone entirely. Now, through social media, business has a way to get the best of both worlds.

By adapting and being flexible with their social content, varying from hashtag laden photos on Instagram to deeper and insightful business posts on LinkedIn, business now has a way of bringing the right experience to the right target market. From here, new customer specific content management ideas can be formed, allowing for targeted messages from the brand to the consumer based entirely on their interests and social personality types. However, this also changes the concept of relationship management, as now to be effective, a business must manage tens of different relationship channels and create engaging content for all of them. This, of course, is very time consuming.

Fortunately, there are now tools on the market able to help this, either in scheduling posts for the future, or fully automating a channel to decrease the workload. By being responsive and creating memorable experiences in each social interaction, a business can now position itself to create lasting and meaningful relationships, provided they continue to offer engaging content.