In the world of customer success and relationship management, it’s tempting to go above and beyond for your most valued clients. After all, shouldn’t your biggest accounts get the royal treatment? While this approach may seem logical, it often leads to unforeseen challenges that can undermine your overall customer success strategy.

The Pitfalls of Preferential Treatment

1. Scalability Issues: Providing special treatment to select customers often involves custom solutions or extra attention. Maintaining these personalized approaches becomes increasingly difficult and resource-intensive, especially with rapid organizational growth.
2. Unrealistic Expectations: Once customers become accustomed to special treatment, they may come to expect it as the norm. This can lead to disappointment when you can’t consistently meet these elevated expectations, or when new employees don’t have the ‘custom playbook’ for these special customers.
3. Fairness Concerns: Other customers may feel undervalued if they perceive unequal treatment. With online reviews and experience sharing, customers can and will discuss their experiences with your companies services, and potentially set up unrealistic expectations for other customers. This can damage relationships and potentially lead to customer churn.
4. Operational Complexity: Managing different service levels or rules for various customers complicates your processes and leads to errors, inefficiencies, and employee frustration. Standard Operating Procedures are named this for a reason, and any deviation from those procedures risks falling through the cracks. The process for the customer success department are designed to work in tandem with the other departments processes and needs, by skipping steps or changing the terms you risk failing to deliver on promises.
5. Difficulty in Standardizing Best Practices: When each top customer receives unique treatment, it becomes challenging to identify and implement standardized best practices across your customer base. In the beginning of developing these procedures, you risk creating SOP’s that are written for the exceptions, not the bulk of your business. This is expensive, time-consuming, and incredibly frustrating for both customers and employees.

A Better Approach: Consistent, Replicable Excellence

Instead of offering special treatment to select customers, focus on delivering consistently excellent service to all clients, and strategically segmenting clients if their needs are not able to be served by a one-size-fits-all process. This approach:

• Scales more effectively as your business grows
• Sets realistic expectations for all customers
• Promotes fairness and equality in your customer relationships
• Simplifies operations and reduces the risk of errors
• Allows for the development and implementation of standardized best practices

By striving for uniformly high-quality service, you can create a more sustainable and successful customer relationship management strategy. Remember: the goal is not to lower the bar for your top customers, but to raise it for everyone – creating a win-win situation for both your business and your entire customer base.