Love story

I was really interested to hear Warren Buckley, BT’s Customer Service Director, tell a recent event that ‘marketers need to embark on a love affair with their customer service counterparts or risk failing their brands’.

I couldn’t agree more. I may have had some issues in the past with BT and its customer service teams but on this occasion Mr Buckley, a man who does respond to customer e-mails, has got it spot on.

Mr Buckley’s comment was that by having a dialogue with the customer service teams, marketers could save a whole load of money on customer research. Yes they would but I think there is far far more to it than that.

It always amazes me that marketers don’t pay more attention to the brand experience being delivered day in, day out through their customer service teams. For too long this has been seen as the preserve of the customer service chief while marketers take the line of least resistance and focus on their brand wheels, their ads and the other visual symbols of their power but it is on the ground where their brand hits the road where they can make a real difference. This is where marketers need to start to fall in love.

Mr Buckley wants marketers to work with their colleagues to determine a consistent tone of voice for marketing campaigns and responses to customer queries. I would want marketers to go a lot further.

As you know it never ceases to amaze me how few marketers and customer service chiefs actually put their customer services teams to the test and actually experience the service through a customer's eyes. You will be amazed what you might find out. If you want to improve the quality of airline food, serve it in the Board Room, is my principle.

I did hear last week of one CEO who spent the weekend putting his customer service to the test and then spent Monday firing off a series of e-mails to his operations and customer service bosses with required fixes. Good on him. More of us need to do that to get our own direct and real impressions of the service our business delivers.

Speaking as a marketer, and a customer, here are my top 5 things that we need to be looking for in our customer service departments:

#1 Is the IVR system intuitive and easy to use? If we adopt a principle online that the customer should be within 2 clicks of the service they way, why not follow this principle on the phone and make it easy to get to speak to someone.

#2 How customer friendly is the tone of voice? It is always best to use personal and not impersonal pronouns, scrap jargon and three letter acronyms, use the active and not the passive case. And why don’t people sign letters and put a name to them instead of using the corporate squiggle?

#3 Why not take the name of the customer before asking for an account or an order number? I am a person not a number. Take the name and use it. It will make the call sound more personal.

#4 Why not scrap call duration targets? Targets forces call handlers to aim to hurry the call. Scrap the target and more calls will be resolved.

#5 Why tell customers that the Marketing Director or Customer Services Directors doesn’t speak to customers? If your job is to stop your business doing dumb things to customers, you should speak and listen to customers.

And one final thought, give the customer service people some empowerment to do the right thing for the customer instead of slavishly following a script or a process. In many instances I have no doubt that people do their job properly but fail to deliver a satisfying customer experience. This might help.

Obviously there is more to the love affair than this but hopefully this is a start.

Next week is Valentine’s Day, a perfect time for marketers to fall in love with customer service...and vice versa.