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The role of customer service in marketing Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. Back when I was a fresh-faced 18-year-old in my first job, I was sent on a 'customer care' training course. Here we are over 15 years later and customer service is still a hot topic. The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) has published an excellent article on the practicalities of delivering high standards of customer service. (See below for a link to the article.) People who don't really understand what marketing is all about might ask 'what's it got to do with them?'. But the article is quite rightly written very much in a marketing context. The CIM's article correctly states: "Marketing has moved from 'transactional marketing' to 'relationship marketing'. * Transactional marketing focused on attracting new customers and simply getting the sale. * Relationship marketing focuses on getting customers and keeping them in the longer term using a combination of marketing, quality and customer service." I won't get into the specifics of what good customer service programmes look like. The CIM article is one of hundreds of useful resources you can find with such information. But here's the thing that I've noticed during my travels through various companies, both as an employee and as a freelance copywriter, consultant and trainer . . . . . . the marketing department isn't always heavily involved in the customer service programme. The more I think about it, the more that troubles me. Why? Because good marketers should be doing things like carrying out competitor research. They should be finding out what their customers expect from them. They should be measuring customer retention rates and working out how to improve them. And all these things are very much to do with customer service. So would you agree that the marketing department should be at the very heart of a customer service programme, rather than merely consulted now and again? Here are three of many practical initiatives that an organisation's marketers could be involved in: * Customer satisfaction surveys. These are often carried out by the administration departments. But shouldn't marketers be better trained to conduct effective research, or able to properly commission experts to do it? * Internal communication programmes. Customer satisfaction depends on every individual and department in an organisation treating each other as customers. (It's the 'internal customer' concept.) Only then can the end customer receive the highest levels of service. So marketers can play an important role in helping employees adopt a marketing approach to each other - in other words, finding out what each other needs and then delivering. (I've written an article on 'internal communications as a marketing function'. You can find it on my web site here: http://www.pcbonline.co.uk/ictips3.htm). * Benchmarking against the competition. Is a call centre manager or administration manager best placed to set service standards? Do they have the time and resources to find out what the competition is doing? Maybe. But maybe the marketing department is even better equipped to carry out the research. If you work in a marketing department you may already be involved in initiatives like these. But if you aren't, then is there scope to do so? And if you are a sole trader or small business owner without a marketing department, there is still perhaps room to better integrate customer service with your overall marketing strategy. Are you guilty of working hard to find new customers, instead of making sure you keep the ones you already have? Copyright 2004 Richard Groom |