Today’s interview is with Victoria Wejchert, who is the founder and CEO of Kinship, a contact management app that makes it easy to store and act on contact information to build stronger professional and personal connections. Victoria joins me today to talk about Kinship, the CRM space, building a phone-based CRM application in what is already a crowded market and how with all of the tech that we are surrounded by right now we are not really focusing on building real, lasting and meaningful relationships.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – 12 principles for turning customers and employees into lifelong fans – Interview with Jon Picoult of Watermark Consulting – and is number 408 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Victoria:

• I’ve lost touch with a lot of people I really care about both professionally and personally and I was thinking about how to get better at this. I turned to the person in my life who is amazing at maintaining relationships and that’s my mother. She’s a serial entrepreneur and showed me her system – agendas, calendars, notebooks etc. And I was like, wow, this is old school. But, what if we did a digital version of that?
• Hence we built Kinship, a relationship management tool, that anyone can download from the app store. But, we actually sell to a lot of companies that are in relationship intensive spaces.
• CRM is not just about technology, it’s actually about customer relationship management.
• Most CRM systems are really focused on mass marketing and pushing people through a pipeline.
• It’s kind of ironic that relationship management is in their name because it feels like the relationship management part is not actually there.
• Kinship is for all that soft touch data and for actually staying in touch. It’s also for all the data that just doesn’t fit in a CRM system.
• For example, imagine you met someone and their child is 16 so next year will be the last year of school. So, getting a note one year from now from me saying “Hey, congratulations, you made it to the 12th grade.” You know it’s those soft touch moments that are so important but they don’t live well in CRM systems.
• Kinship lends itself best to industries that are more dependent on high touch relationships and longer term relationships i.e real estate, law etc.
• It’s only available on iOS right now but an Android, desktop version and a web/browser based version is in production.
• Example to show the variety of uses: the new general manager of the Intercontinental in New York City started in her role and suddenly realised that she had taken over this massive hotel and had all of these people that she works with. She uses Kinship to keep a track of the relationships that she is building with all of her staff and things that she needs to remember.
• Harvard’s longest clinical study shows that depth and the quality of your relationships will determine how healthy and how successful you are in life.
• People talk about personalization but then they can get tripped up by being able to deliver it at scale.
• Always listen to your customers, really listen and ask questions.
• Victoria’s Punk CX word: simplicity.
• Victoria’s Punk CX brand: Net-a-Porter

About Victoria

Victoria Wejchert is the founder and CEO of Kinship, – your relationship superpower, a contact management app that makes it easy to store and act on contact information to build stronger professional and personal connections. As an entrepreneur, investor, and anthropologist, Victoria’s passion is reinventing industries by creating or investing in businesses that have a positive social impact, improve customer experience, and enable personal growth.

Prior to leading Kinship, she created Friends – Taste Your Time, a Polish healthy fast food chain that she ran as CEO. She built the chain to 12 outlets in under three years before selling it to a larger private gastronomy company. Victoria remains invested and involved in the agricultural sector. She also purchased Poland’s second largest chain of cardiology clinics, Allenort, which was restructured and successfully sold to Scanmed Multimedis, a subsidiary of an international private hospital operator, Life Healthcare Group. In the healthcare sector, she also acquired The Kusnacht Practice, the world’s most exclusive psychiatric clinic focused on addiction therapy. Victoria’s training in investment banking at UBS has contributed to her success, as well as her academic qualifications, which include an MPhil in Human Evolutionary Studies from Cambridge University and a BSc in Management from City University London.

Check out Kinship, where you will find the link to download the app, say Hi to them and Victoria on Twitter @heykinship and @VickyWej and feel free to connect with Victoria on LinkedIn here.

Image: CRM by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images