Does your organization ensure linkage between Marketing and Customer Support?

Do you know whether your organization ensures linkage between Marketing and Customer Support? Your customers do. Here’s how.

Your customer responds to a banner/email/chat/phone call advertisement. The person they interact with has no idea of the product or service, so the customer does one of the following.

a) Hangs up/disconnects/closes browser
b) Waits patiently
c) Waits impatiently while the customer support agent finds someone who might help
d) Uses Google to find another source for the product or service

If your customer’s solution is either “a.” or “d.” you have missed your window of opportunity to acquire or retain that customer. This results in wasted marketing budget and lower customer satisfaction.

This scenario takes place when Service Centers and the Marketing department don’t work together to jointly plan marketing programs. Some companies think they can get an edge on the competition by moving the Service Center to the Marking department, but just making this move doesn’t ensure that the customer service team will be ready when the marketing for the latest product or service generates the first customer response.

Each customer marketing initiative requires a significant investment of resources to generate the desired customer response, and each customer touch point is a moment of truth for that initiative. Your company has only a small window of opportunity to successfully deliver the message and convey why it matters to the customer.

Here are some Best Practices Strategies to consider to prevent situations like the one above as well as to integrate your Service and Support Organization to deliver value for your Marketing spend.

1) Design success metrics, measures and customer satisfaction surveys based on methodology, i.e. response rates, conversions, sales and customer acquisition.
2) Jointly plan for the important dates: mail drops, banner ads, TV, print and email blasts to plan staffing and training needs. Include outbound contacts if needed.
3) Plan agent training to include scripting, scenarios, FAQ’s, and tools required to successfully complete the transaction.
4) Ensure IVR/VRU has correct messaging and routing set up prior to first call. Test.
5) Include customer service agents in the process for Voice of Customer insight.
6) Establish formal cross-organizational feedback processes between all key stakeholders. Agenda items include performance, recommendations and action items to make the necessary adjustments to ensure program success.
7) Ensure the end-to-end initial marketing through completed transaction process drives brand awareness, recognition and linkage to products and services.
8) Determine whether you will survey customers, and if yes, that you measure overall program success and opportunities for improvement.

Your Service and Support Organization and Marketing departments can deliver your desired program results when they jointly plan programs. These programs are even stronger when they include success measures and intentional plans for service delivery.

Agent Training and Knowledge Objects - Strategies to Deliver on the Customer Experience

Many organizations have already initiated the necessary steps to align knowledge objects for customer contact consistency across all contact channels (phone, chat, email, IVR/VRU, web site self help….) while many more are either starting or considering this strategic move.

The opportunity is now to take the next step that links agent training to the customer knowledge base for consistent customer answers across all contact channels. In many cases, agents receive training on handling a contact one way while the customer facing knowledge base presents conflicting information that causes customer confusion. This issue is compounded by use of separate response libraries for chat, email and IVR/VRU responses.

The root cause of this is many well-intentioned organizations do not practice a holistic approach to knowledge management across all potential customer touch points. The problem manifests itself by inconsistent responses when the customer crosses channels. In many cases, the customer unsuccessfully attempted self-help and is now a live customer call.

No matter where your organization is in the contact channel convergence journey, a rigorous evaluation of the knowledge content delivery process will provide a foundation for a consistent customer experience. Some suggested best practices:

1. Establish a periodic process review to evaluate training and knowledge content across all
knowledge repositories to ensure alignment.
2. Start with highest volume contacts.
3. Use people (agents if possible) most familiar with the actual customer contact to ensure
consistency between how it supposed to be performed with how it is actually performed.
4. Highlight opportunities for contact prevention/elimination of contacts and reduced handle
times as part of the review process.
5. Develop an agent knowledge contribution process that focuses on key needs such as issue
resolution and customer satisfaction.
6. Reward and recognize employees with valid knowledge contributions for improvements on a
regular basis. Establish this practice as a pillar of your continuous process improvement
culture.
7. As you plan for new work or changes to existing work, put in place the process for concurrent
knowledge base updates and agent training.
8. Finally - Test for consistency across channels. Mystery shop phone calls, email, chat, and
search the web to ensure your agents are ready before the customer attempts to contact you.

In establishing this rigor into your knowledge content management process, you can review across all contact channels to ensure a consistent end-to-end customer experience. This process will allow you to reduce costs, avoid confusion and deliver on your customer service mission.

About the Author: Les Hyde has an extensive leadership background in customer service and IT operations with two Fortune 500 companies and the United States Air Force. He holds a B.S. in Information Systems from Park University, an MBA from University of Phoenix, and numerous technical certifications. He is an active board member of the Kansas City Association of Customer Contact Professionals (http://www.associationccp.com/) and also serves as the Vice President of Marketing.

Kansas City area Association of Customer Contact Professionals (ACCP)

The Kansas City Association of Contact Center Professionals is growing and would like to link with similar local associations as well as national organizations such as to share knowledge and best practices.

We are a not-for-profit organization whose members are from various call center types and sizes with a wide range of services represented including Technical, Customer Care, Financial, Legal, Medical, Outbound, Outsourcers and Collections. The association also includes vendors who can assist in all aspects of contact center operations.

Our purpose is to share best practices across the many support professionals as well as learn the latest and greatest in technology, tools, business process, and customer service.

If you have website recommendations, best practices to share, or any other useful information please let me know.

Thanks
Les