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Customer experience is improved by regular collaboration
Customer experience may dominate marketers’ thinking, but they will never maximise its potential without collaborating with customer service staff.
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Source: Salesforce
State of Marketing
57%
of marketers say using AI is essential to creating one-to-one experiences
88%
of top-performing marketers collaborate with customer services on social media enquiries
86%
of top-performing marketers say customer experience is a competitive advantage
marketing
customer
services
underperformers
moderate performers
high performers
42%
66%
90%
Marketing and service collaborate on a regular basis
T
12 April 2018
Why seamless service sets
the best marketing apart
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Even in a B2B context, where personal relationships are often king, finding some process to ingest data from customer services keeps marketers on top. Ben Rhodes, group marketing director at Royal Mail, says: “There is a feedback loop between the teams in the contact centres and the marketing team. This ensures we have insight into customer service feedback and where we should enhance customer journeys. Through our customer experience board, and alongside colleagues from our operations and product areas, we discuss progress and prioritise initiatives.”
Again, consistency of experience is important. Taking that feedback loop and actually applying the insights to the customer experience is essential. For Royal Mail, it meant improving elements of its digital experience that were lacking.
“A good example of this is how we have enhanced the ‘help and support’ section on our website by optimising both content and navigation, and also by empowering our customers through providing additional self-serve capabilities,” Rhodes adds.
The role of technology
Salesforce’s State of Marketing report expects use of emerging marketing technology (martech) to grow by around 30% year on year in the near term.
Social listening tools, customer identity management and marketing automation are already embedded in organisations, with around two-thirds of marketers using the technologies and a further 21% planning to do so in the next two years. High performers also value martech for its ability to improve collaboration between marketing functions and the business at large (88%).
But, while Hostelworld’s Fahy agrees that bringing in technology to help build structure around data capture and customer management is important, it can’t be at the exclusion of all else: “I have customer operations and services within my team at Hostelworld and they know how to get hold of me. I’m a believer in having a strong network in an organisation where you can simply ring up and run things past someone. There is a formal process to capture data but a lot of people want to make that a rigid process.”
There are some caveats to moving forward with that technology into artificial intelligence. The Salesforce research finds that 57% of marketers using AI say it is either ‘absolutely’ or ‘very’ essential in helping their company create one-to-one marketing across every touchpoint, but Macmillan’s Taylor isn’t so sure.
“We don’t use AI just now but who knows what the future promises? Digital does offer massive opportunities but it doesn’t sound very human. When we’re trying to help, it is professional-level expertise. Our [contact staff] aren’t targeted by how quickly they can get off the phone. There are no restrictions on the level of support and calls can take 20 minutes or more.”
Even in organisations where automation is a fact of life, marketers have to be careful not to turn everything into a process for the sake of speed and cost efficiency.
Royal Mail’s Rhodes says: “Our approach is to provide simple and seamless customer journeys. Sometimes that involves enabling customers to self-serve. However, we know that customers may want to talk to a human being at key points in the customer journey, so providing access to our
highly trained and expert staff - whether that is in sales or service - is a key part of the customer journey design.”
Building a culture of collaboration
Certainly, marketers who do bring their customer-facing cousins into the fold are reaping the rewards. The Institute of Customer Service published a report into customer satisfaction in the charity sector at the end of 2017 and found that Macmillan Cancer Support led the table because “its attitude, behaviour and skills were of a high standard”.
“We have been integrating customer services under a single directorate, which covers a number of disciplines. It made sense to us. We have
to take a joined-up approach when we’re communicating with supporters and donors,” explains Macmillan’s executive director of fundraising Richard Taylor. It goes without saying that in a healthcare and support organisation, it is “important to give the best customer service possible”.
The Institute’s report showed that most people (62%) interact with charities in person while only 16% do so on a website, but still the experience has to be consistent. That means the insights garnered during these all-important personal contacts must filter through to the rest of the organisation.
“This is cultural and driven top to bottom and bottom to top. The work we do around feedback gets discussed with the board of trustees, who want to see the metrics - which includes complaints, call handling, net promoter scores, surveys and more,” Taylor says. He adds that all this information feeds into a regular programme of review, ranging from a board of trustees meeting twice a year via the head of customer experience to quarterly meetings with the senior team and monthly contact within Taylor’s team.
Customer service as a source of data
“Customer service [departments] have been waiting for someone to come and talk to them, to get hold of all this information that isn’t being used,” says Hostelworld’s chief customer officer, Kristof Fahy. “It is an incredibly helpful resource but they often don’t have a feed into the wider business. [They are] capturing all this verbatim customer data we get excited about, but there’s nowhere for it to go.”
The research shows that data is still a struggle even for top-performing marketers, with their top issues being creating a single view of the customer and taking advantage of data from different sources.
Fahy is quick to point out that, in his current position as well as during previous tenures at William Hill and Ladbrokes, seeking out customer services input has been integral to the smooth workings of the operation. “Whether it was giving them a role in the voice of the customer programmes or bringing up issues quick-fire, they were always so happy to help.” At the end of the day, he points out, “half of this stuff is what we call customer experience today”.
There is a need to bring customer services into the heart of the marketing operation, which means more than just creating a stream of social listening data. There is a raft of unstructured insights that provide a vital system of checks and balances to marketing strategy.
“They’ll say X or Y just won’t work. What might sound good on paper or look good in social just doesn’t work when it goes live,” he warns. This is why Salesforce’s research finds that 87% of top-performing marketers alert customer services to special promotions and offers, while only 39% of underperformers do. Exclude customer services from communications planning at your peril.
op marketing teams are more than twice as likely as underperformers to collaborate with customer services. And yet, with an ongoing focus on all things digital, it is perhaps surprising that the relationship between the two functions isn’t talked about more often.
Most conversations between marketers currently pivot towards the theme of customer experience. Indeed, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing report, customer experience is cited by 86% of top-performing marketers as their main point of competitive advantage. In comparison, only a third (33%) of underperforming brands put marketing in charge of customer experience.
But marketers agree that customer service is both the engine generating a great deal of that experience and a critical source of insight for optimising it. Salesforce’s research shows that 88% of top performing marketers have a process where customer service collaborates with marketing to manage and respond to social inquiries and issues.
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