Icon (Close Menu)

Logout

Who Owns Customer Service? (Jim Karrh On Marketing)

3 min read

Effective business leaders implicitly know that “the customer comes first,” so it’s no surprise that one of the goals I hear most frequently from executives is for their organizations to raise the level of customer service. This is typically an element of other strategic initiatives, such as generating better customer retention, expanding the wallet share per customer or hitting a particular customer-satisfaction score.

On occasion I see a customer-service initiative as primarily a defensive effort, spurred on by either a company boo-boo or another organization’s public stumble. Certainly these days (when everything is sharable and almost everything is actually shared) a bad service encounter can cause a PR black eye. You might recall the technology journalist Ryan Block and his customer service call from you-know-where with Comcast last year (for a painful reminder, see Gwen Moritz’s column “The Home of Outrageous Service,” July 21, 2014).

Aside from defensively trying to avoid potential reputation hits, improving customer service makes a lot of sense when companies want to go on offense and drive customer retention. According to a recent survey from Salesforce Marketing Cloud and reported in FierceCMO.com, the majority of both business-to-business (66 percent) and business-to-consumer (52 percent) customers say they stop buying after a bad service encounter. When you start losing a bunch of current customers, the impact spreads and becomes apparent in financial metrics such as the cost of acquiring the next customer.

We aren’t just talking about some small percentage of customers who might call you because of an emergency; a Message Systems survey found that on average nearly one-third of customers will eventually connect with a brand for a nonemergency service issue. That encompasses the way your company handles the phones, the help desk, mobile/social channels and face-to-face interactions in the field.

Although customer service successes (or failures) tie directly into marketing and sales goals, I find that customer service isn’t always considered to be a key marketing function. Sometimes it falls under an operations or IT leader. Sometimes it goes to a cross-functional committee (and thus eventually dies). Sometimes it is assigned to the marketing department, but because the marketing leader has so many other initiatives in play, customer service gets only flyby levels of attention.

Chief marketing officers have seen their roles and responsibilities change dramatically in recent years. Aside from being brand custodians, advertising managers and lead generators, marketing leaders increasingly have to take the lead in areas such as:

  • Technology. It is widely predicted that, in just two years, CMOs as a group in corporate America will have larger discretionary technology budgets than do chief information officers or chief technology officers.
  • Social marketing. The Salesforce.com 2015 State of Marketing report shows a huge year-to-year jump in the percentage of marketers who see social marketing as a “critical enabler of products and services,” from 25 percent a year ago to 64 percent now.
  • Content marketing and thought leadership. Blogs, webinars, white papers and other means of establishing credibility will continue to grow. Someone (typically in marketing) has to take care of the research, editing or writing, distribution and analytics.
  • Sales enablement. As prospects are engaging sales people much later in their buying cycles — if at all — the marketing department has the challenge of providing more “sales-ready” tools that go beyond good-looking collateral materials and do more than provide warm leads.

All of these areas are important and legitimate. So are marketers’ familiar roles as keepers of the brand. Yet customer service is so fundamental that it shouldn’t get lost in the mix. My recommendation is to affirm customer service as a strategic marketing function with the tools and training necessary to ensure consistently good behaviors across the company (avoiding the Ryan Block experience with Comcast), regular attention to metrics that will help you spot trends, and support for managers in their role as customer-service coaches. n

Jim Karrh of Little Rock is a marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. Visit JimKarrh.com, email him at Jim@JimKarrh.com and follow him on Twitter @JimKarrh.

Send this to a friend