"Customer Service is the New Marketing!"

"Customer Service is the New Marketing!" , says Zappos' marketing chief Aaron Magness in an interview with Fast Company.

I liked his answer to the question What is marketing all about?:

"There are five principles that I try to focus on in everything that has to do with marketing:

1. Customer service is the new marketing. The days of dictating your brand to the public are long gone. There is so much access to information; the customer is actually dictating your brand to you.


2. Communicate with your customers, don’t market at them. Customers get bombarded with marketing messages every day (practically every second). Find ways to interact with them. Discussions drive loyalty, not one way messaging.


3. Don’t try to be interesting, be interested. I first heard this phrase from our CEO, Tony Hsieh, and thought it was great. It is really spot on. A lot of companies try to launch a really creative campaign, but lack the follow up to the brand promise. Your campaign should highlight what your brand promise is, not try to invent one.


4. Try to WOW at every interaction. This goes for working with employees, vendors and customers. Personal relationships and interactions drive everything. You need to capitalize on them. This is obviously something that is very true and important at Zappos. I don’t think I every put it into words until I worked here, but the importance and implications are great.


5. Your culture will dictate your success. This goes back to building your team. Hire great people, treat them like adults and let them do great work. The rest should come naturally on its own. "

About Leadership Commitment and Customer Service Excellence

On a previous occasion I stated that no organization can expect to rise above the level of commitment of its senior leadership.

A recent blog entry by Bruce Temkin of Forrester reinforced this. He made the point that successfully managing customer service and experience really is a competence and not a function of a (delegated) program.

Bruce writes: "To achieve this principle, companies need to infuse customer-centric DNA into their culture. But this level of change requires a high degree of commitment from the senior executive team. I think this quote from Mario Andretti explains why: Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.

In a previous post I discussed how companies with customer experience leaders are progressing faster than other firms. The creation of that type of role can be a sign of commitment, but the president or CEO and all of her/his direct reports must demonstrates an ongoing commitment in order to change the culture.

My sense is that senior executives are intrigued with customer experience, but most are not yet fully committed to it.

8 Signs Of Executive Commitment
If a senior executive team is fully committed to customer-centricity, then it can answer yes to all of the following questions:

1. Do senior executive staff meetings have a recurring agenda item on customer experience? (this does not include dealing with customer emergencies)
2. Do internal communications from the CEO/President regularly include discussions of customer experience?
3. Do external communications from the CEO/President regularly include discussions of customer experience?
4. Is customer experience explicitly discussed (in some form) within the company’s strategic plan(s)?
5. Does the executive team have a clear set of customer experience objectives?
6. Do most of the executive team members have goals based on customer experience objectives?
7. Is the compensation of executive team members tied to customer experience objectives?
8. Does the organization believe that the CEO/President would trade-off some short-term financial results for longer-term customer experience gains?
   

The bottom line: Senior execs with less than full commitment need to be committed."

Thanks, Bruce...

Poll Finds That Customer Service and Recognition Trump Privacy, Pricing

Consumers to Providers: Do You Know Who I Am?

I was interviewed last week by Advertising Age about the influence of technology on customer service. Here is the AdAge.com article published on their website on March 10, 2008.

Privacy concerns? Not so much. A Harris Interactive poll finds that a whopping 95% of people believe it is at least somewhat important that companies know "who I am, my buying history, past problems or complaints, preferences and billing record." Some 37% said knowledge of personal history is important, and more than a quarter -- 27% -- called it "very important."

But you can't just know your consumers; you have to love them to keep them. "There's a whole generation of people coming up that will vote with their feet," said Frank Florence, VP-chief marketing officer of Chordiant Software, which commissioned the poll.

• Some 62% of people surveyed said they would not hesitate to cancel or switch services if they had a negative experience, and 60% said they had already done it at least once.
• Of the 28% of people who had never switched service providers, 78% said they would change if they received poor customer service. Enduring bad rapYounger consumers, in particular, are more likely to be less understanding of bumbled customer service, Harris' survey found.

That only makes sense when you consider what this publication has said again and again: This is the age of the tech-empowered consumer, where customer-service rants don't begin and end in a call center but live on in vitriolic e-mails, blogs, broadcast blasts and web videos. One bad customer-service episode doesn't fade quickly; it is revisited, repeated and replayed in perpetuity. And that, of course, puts a new spin on the old customer-service adage that says if people like your product, they'll tell one person, but if they hate it, they'll tell 10 people. Now, thanks to technology, those 10 people are more likely to be 100, 1,000 or even 1 million. "The technology age has really made consumers develop a real-time mentality," said Eric Fraterman, principal of Customer Focus Consulting.

More interactionMarketing executives who think negative chatter doesn't do real damage to their brands should rethink their mind-sets, said analysts and customer-service-industry insiders. "Your brand is impacted by all of your customer interactions," said Forrester Research analyst Bruce Temkin. "Today there are many more opportunities for the customer to interact with your brand -- and there are many more opportunities for people to discuss the interaction they had." The good news is that technology cuts both ways. Companies can use it to better address consumers' comments, needs and complaints. For example, companies such as Chordiant have developed sophisticated call-center software that can predict customer behavior and offer solutions in real time. Say a credit-card customer is upset with a monthly service charge incurred while stuck in an airplane with no internet access. The software can evaluate the customer's payment history and other behavior on file, analyze the problem and offer a set of solutions. In one case, an agent may be given authority to give the consumer a credit of up to $300 (rather than a standard $100) based on the software's conclusion that the solution has a 70% chance of satisfying the customer.

Of course, technology works best when mixed with quality people. "It's tremendously seductive to think we can use technology to solve all our problems. But customers, as tech-savvy as they are, just want to be helped," Mr. Fraterman said.