Learn What Keeps Your Customers Up at Night

Sometimes there's just no substitute for good old-fashioned

Just ask Adrienne Lumpkin. She'll tell you customer relationships were key to the success of Alternate Access, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based computer telephone firm she and Kelly Lumpkin started at their dinner table one night in 1993. "Once you make a sale, it's the beginning of a relationship, not the end," Adrienne explains.

And while cultivating relationships isn't a top priority for all businesses, Adrienne knows that for a company like Alternate Access, which focuses on telephony customization, it's essential. "Sometimes it's hard to shut up and hear what your customers' needs are," admits Adrienne. "But I want to make sure that my customers tell me what they need instead of telling my competitor."

Case in point: the North Carolina Board of Nursing. Its first contact with Alternate Access was more than three years ago, when Alternate Access developed a call-handling application to manage 90 percent of the calls that came through on the board's busy phone lines. "We developed a system that handled 4,000 calls in the first two weeks it was deployed," Adrienne says.

After successfully completing that project, Alternate Access worked to maintain the relationship — and find out what other help the company needed. The constant contact paid off when the board turned to Alternate Access to develop another telephony system — this time to streamline the election of board members. They developed "Voice of the People," a telephony application that automated the election process.

The new $15,000 system handles approximately 100,000 calls, automatically tallies votes, and calculates election results. It replaced the board's paper-ballot voting system, which took more than two months and cost $80,000 to carry out.

Adrienne says that she knows consumers today have more choices than ever and can buy products easily over the Internet. That's why she stresses the importance of listening to and maintaining relationships with customers. "There's more to it than just the product," she says. "You need to know what's keeping your customer up at night."

— Karen Gujarathi