Customer relationships, kept.
In context: Stage 04 · Evaluate · Business model canvas
How you get, keep and grow each customer segment, and what kind of relationship that takes.
Customer Relationships is the type of bond a business holds with each segment, from fully self-serve to personal assistance to community. It covers acquisition, retention and growth. Decide what each segment expects, then build the relationship the product and the price can actually sustain.
What this block is
Customer Relationships is the type of relationship a business establishes with each customer segment. Some segments want to be left alone to buy and use a product on their own (self-serve). Some want a person to talk to (personal assistance). Some want to belong to something (community). The block asks you to be honest about which of these each segment actually wants.
It also covers the whole arc, not just the first sale: how you acquire a customer, how you retain them, and how you grow the value of that relationship over time. Get the type wrong and you either smother a self-serve buyer with attention they did not ask for, or starve a buyer who needed support and quietly lost trust.
How it applies
The £149 sourdough proofing box has no app, so for me the relationship is mostly the product itself. A box that reliably holds 26°C to within half a degree, batch after batch, earns trust in a way no onboarding email ever could. Around that sits a light touch: a short email sequence and a presence in the Sourdough School world, where the audience already gathers, rather than a community we have to build from nothing.
Retention here is not a subscription. There is nothing recurring to bill for and I would not pretend otherwise. People stay loyal because the box does its one job well and because, on the rare occasion something goes wrong, support is straightforward and human. That is the relationship I can honestly sustain at this price, so that is the one we design for.
Where it fits
Customer Relationships sits alongside Channels and Customer Segments on the right side of the canvas, the part that describes how value reaches people. See how all nine blocks connect on the Business model diagram.
Try it yourself
Take one of your segments and write down, plainly, whether they want self-serve, a person, or a community. Then ask whether your price and your product can actually pay for that kind of relationship. If they cannot, you have found a gap worth fixing now.
Or work it through guided. Start the Free Sprint →
The Business Model Canvas is the work of Strategyzer (Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur), shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence. Source: strategyzer.com.
— Next block → Channels