Essential Training for Business Students: Mastering Customer Relationships

In 2005, Amazon changed the game for customer loyalty. Jeff Bezos introduced Amazon Prime, a $79 annual membership that offered free two-day shipping. Now this sounds fairly simple, but what happened next was anything but. Within just a year, Prime memberships doubled. Fast forward, and Prime is now a thriving billion-dollar ecosystem, bundling shipping, video streaming, exclusive deals, and more. Now, Amazon has built an environment that keeps customers engaged, connected, and committed to the brand.

What made Amazon different wasn’t just its ability to acquire customers. It was a focus on building relationships. This approach has become the gold standard because the most successful companies today are the ones that have built trust, loyalty, and community.

Learning by doing

If this is the kind of thinking today’s businesses are built on, are future business leaders being trained the same way? The unfortunate answer is no. Most business schools haven’t quite caught up. The focus is still tilted towards crafting campaigns, optimising sales funnels, and building brand awareness, with very little emphasis on the actual experience a customer has after they come on board. But if the real challenge today is to sustain customer relationships, what B-schools need to start doing is to encourage experience or ‘learning by doing’. Students need to understand what it takes to launch, grow, and sustain a business, which can only happen if they are encouraged to make decisions with real consequences, adapt to challenges, and understand that customer relationships are central to long-term success.

For example, when building a dropshipping business, students pick up the principles of online marketing. When building a SaaS platform, they build real products that actually help their customers, teaching them customer retention through customer support. Similarly, offline brick-and-mortar business building will teach students supply-chain constraints, in turn increasing the understanding of how one can increase footfall rates. This sort of curriculum and pedagogy brings in customer relationships into every aspect of learning.

Moreover, to truly understand Customer Relationship Management, students need to experience the pain of losing a customer — because every founder, at some point, faces the sting of watching a once-loyal customer walk away, taking with them lost revenue, wasted marketing cost, and negative word-of-mouth. Take the example of Netflix. When it hiked subscription prices and separated DVD rentals from streaming in 2011, it lost 800,000 subscribers in a single quarter and its stock price plunged 77%. That’s a lesson no case study can teach.

If B-schools encourage hands-on learning where students actually feel the loss first-hand, they will graduate with lessons that stick. Handling negative reviews, navigating service failures, or winning back a lost customer really aren’t theoretical exercises, but the backbone of business success. But none of this will happen unless there’s a shift in mindset. Schools must start acknowledging that every business leader, whether a founder or an executive, needs to think like a builder. Whether someone is running a startup or managing a Fortune 500 company, the ability to understand customer behaviour, iterate quickly, and build long-term relationships will define success.

So why are project-building semesters the exception instead of the rule? Until schools stop treating hands-on building as an elective, and start treating it as the foundation, we’ll keep graduating professionals trained only to manage or market, and not to build. But, today loyalty is earned based on experience built and it is the builders who will win. If the future of business belongs to those who can create lasting connections, then the future of business education belongs to those who teach students how to build them from day one.

The writer is Chief Operating Officer, Tetr College of Business.