Relationship managers work to improve business relationships with partners and customers. Customer relationship managers analyze and improve customer relationships, while business relationship managers focus on nurturing relationships with partners. Delicate approaches are needed to maintain good relationships.
A relationship manager’s job is to work to constantly improve relationships between a company, its partners and its customers. The quality of business relationships cannot be easily quantified or measured, but they are quite valuable nonetheless. The relationship manager is responsible for analyzing business relationships as objectively and quantitatively as possible and applying that knowledge to maintain good relationships and repair bad ones. Some relationship managers work on all of a company’s relationships, while others specialize and focus on business or customer relationships. Both are extremely important, but relationship managers apply different techniques to each type of relationship; therefore, they are usually separate positions.
A customer relationship manager is one who applies specific analytical techniques and practices to examine and improve customer relationships and reputations. This type of relationship manager is usually expected to follow up with existing customers and try to measure the quality of the company’s relationships with them. Using the knowledge gained from examining current customer relationships, customer relationship managers can also suggest and implement new strategies aimed at attracting new customers. This type of manager may need to work closely with other departments, such as sales and advertising, to improve existing relationships and form new ones.
Business relationship managers, on the other hand, focus on nurturing and improving relationships with business partners. Most companies depend on others to provide information or raw materials, and maintaining good relationships with these partner companies is often very important. A business relationship manager might look for ways to encourage entry into a business relationship or streamline the operations of existing relationships, for example. Business relationship management, like customer relationship management, is generally concerned with developing formal methods of tracking and classifying relationships. The business relationship manager should use this collected and quantified information to look for unhealthy relationships that should be discarded, relationships that could be improved, and methods for improving the overall business reputation of a company.
It is often important for a relationship manager to take a delicate approach when trying to develop or improve the business or customer relationship. On the one hand, the relationship manager is trying to derive some specific benefit from any business relationship. He wants a customer to buy more products or a business partner to offer a lower rate for a product or service, for example. On the other hand, he must offer a business deal that is beneficial to both parties. Proposing an unequal trade agreement could weaken a relationship and have a detrimental effect on a business’s reputation.
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