Entrepreneurship 101: Understanding Business Model Canvas - Customer Relationship

Continuing from the last post where we discussed about distribution channels and learnt how your idea/solution can reach your TG. It can be a physical distribution channel or a virtual one. After defining your value proposition and the customer, you often start with your marketing and sales activities. Sales activities generally involve three major phases: Pre-Sales, During Sales and Post Sales. In this post we shall focus on the Customer Relationship aspect of the Business Model Canvas.

Customer Relationship in Business Model

Customer Relationship is often misunderstood to be an activity in the post sales phase. However that isn't true. All the activities that you do right from the time you generate a lead and convert it to sale, involves customer relationship. Customer Relationship in the Business Model Canvas helps you chalk out the various 'channels' with which you would connect with your customer. It can include things like the traditional snail mail, email marketing newsletters, dial-in numbers, dedicated email ids, social media support and so on. You need to define the ways in which you would connect with your customers.

Customer Relationship Modes

We are living in a digital economy and in the era of Marketing 4.0, Customer Relationship is vital. You not only connect with your customers online but also build upon the relationship offline too. More often than not for the end sure, it means only the post sales and service activities where they deal with the company executives. For instance, today Twitter has become a great way for serving customers. Everything from getting a query answered to resolving a problem, is being done via Twitter.

Example Business Model - Customer Relationship

We would continue with the example of Uber like we have been doing in the previous posts. Uber has a well defined business model in place. Since Uber is a completely online entity, they serve their customer queries only online. It's either through the in app help/rating section or via social media. Below is the business model of Uber.

Business Model Canvas of Uber. Courtesy: Business Models Inc

That's all about the Customer Relationship in Entrepreneurship 101: Business Model Canvas - Customer Relationship. It's a vital aspect for consideration as that is only way the customer can connect with you. Be it feedback, suggestions or complaints, your customers would connect with you only via the channels you define here. Thus, choose you channel carefully !