Consider Customer Service as an investment in Marketing

[Digitalface]

It might be odd to hear, coming from someone that delivers marketing strategy but can I suggest you spend more time managing the customers you have instead of random marketing exercises.

Consider a company I learnt from when I was in the States recently, they have an inbound call centre - when the call is completed the call centre worker immediately looks up the caller on social networks (facebook, myspace, orkut, twitter...),befriends them and starts a conversation (does not sell) that ultimately builds a trusting relationship. The customer gets personal updates and information that is specific to them - they typically have a lot of love for the company and start telling all of their friends, recommending and suggesting via email their facebook page and so on.

This is the future of customer care / marketing - if you invest in your people and the process of looking after your customers your marketing spend will need to be much less.

Such is the success of social networks and using them effectively.

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

Great post Colin

I totally agree particularly in the current environment. Business need to add more value to their customers to encourage loyalty. It's back to the old saying about it costing seven times more to get a new customer than to sell to an exisiting one.

It's really amazing though how many big businesses dont even follow this. Dont even start me on P&O Ferries

 

[Digitalface]

The US business recruiting programme insisted that new employees had to have a profile page, blog - some sort of online social activity, this culture was created 6 years ago. As an online retail business they saw the power social networks could have as a CRM tool.

Pretty neat.