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3. My goal was to get our team to have more open-ended, business-level customer conversations.

Name: 3. My goal was to get our team to have more open-ended, business-level customer conversations.
Uploaded: 2021-05-09T13:40:44+00:00
Duration: 21 s
Channel: Bob London
Description: In this dialogue, Bob London and a senior client discuss how the pandemic forced a shift from in‑person to remote customer interactions, revealing that…

9 May 2021 · 0 min

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In this dialogue, Bob London and a senior client discuss how the pandemic forced a shift from in‑person to remote customer interactions, revealing that previously strong‑seeming relationships were weaker than assumed. The client notes that reliance on face‑to‑face cues and informal conversations vanished, leading to missed signals about true customer satisfaction. Despite high NPS scores and quiet accounts, underlying stakeholders—especially budget holders—were dissatisfied. Recognizing that remote engagement will persist, they identify a need for targeted training to develop strategic, virtual relationship‑building skills that can uncover hidden concerns and strengthen connections beyond the limitations of phone or video calls.

I wanted to know what was on your whiteboard that, that was sort of one of the things that you said, this is something we have to tackle that did lead you to connecting with me and agreeing that you needed some help in this area of, let's call it, you know, again, having more strategic customer conversations. What was the outcome you expected or what was the problem you were identifying?
This probably won't be no surprise, but the pandemic itself really turned things for us in that we used to be able to travel and meet people face to face, and you can gather a lot of information in person, the body language. And now we've been doing everything remote and through phone for over a year now. And the one thing that came up to us is that we, we didn't have as strong of relationships as we thought we had, and we wanted to pivot to say like, what does the team need? What training to kind of get us to the next level to learn in this new environment that's not gonna go away for a while? How do we build these relationships? So I think a bit of the pandemic, and then of course, there's always examples of clients where we thought we were in a good shape and then find out we weren't. And you start looking at all the signs, everything was great, they were quiet. Gave us high scores on NPS, but then come to find out there's other layers we were not in touch with that were not happy, that, you know, really controlled the budget for those products.
So you're looking for sort of virtual relationship building? In other words, I've had some other really senior folks like you talk about this, that you used to be able to go sit and sit back and talk and talk about other things. And, you know, you get to know people, you get to know each other. And it's a lot harder to do remotely. And as you said, I think you're right. It's not going to— this phenomenon is not going to go away anytime soon because companies, a lot of companies have realized they can get by just fine this way. But to your point, they need to have the skill sets to kind of, you know, level up so that they can do, you know, not let the relationships lag or build them even better than before.