I took a call from my internet service provider last week inviting me to bundle various services with them (Internet + Phone + TV). It was a distant voice from a distant land. When I explained that my TV service was with a cable company and that I had no wish to change, he hung up on me.
I have no particular beef with unsolicited calls from Bell; in the past, these callers have helped me save money on my rate plans. But I wonder if it realizes how experiences like this continue to chip away at its brand image. No amount of clever, expensive TV advertising can repair a brand when a representative disrespects a client by hanging up the phone on them.
I think the blame lies with lazy marketing. Somewhere, deep in the organization, a product marketing manager is tasked with increasing sales of his product portfolio and is encouraged to use an outsourced, outbound calling facility. The statistics are compelling – hundreds of dials an hour, tens of connections, a few sales and all for a few dollars an hour. There is probably a graph on a cubicle wall tracking the trends and numbers. But who tracks the customer experience – the steady drip, drip, drip as customer loyalty is eroded? It’s lazy marketing, probably driven by budget cuts and intense pressure to increase sales. The customer experience, though, should be top-of-mind with all employees and contractors. Every customer touch point is important from the TV campaign to the direct mail piece to the phone call to the store. They are part of the bigger picture – the marketing strategy and the value proposition.
I am reading a new book called Content Rules (Handley and Chapman) and they talk about reimagining content so that it goes through multiple channels, in different ways (eg Twitter, blog, video). I think you can turn this idea around as a brand owner and look at every content that touches someone and see if it builds or destroys the brand experience.
Just a thought.
Tim
Blog post: bad marketing ideas.
Blog post: brand performance at Yellow Pages.
Blog post: Canada Post misses a marketing opportunity.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe for new posts (it's free)
How do you market something to people who’ve already got one?
How do you market if you’re on strike?
How do you market to people who think your store is frustrating?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Well said Tim. So many companies lose sight of the customer they are trying to service.
Nice one Tim. Just had my mobile phone company wanting to renew my Blackberry contract and encouraging me to upgrade my phone. Please could I make a quick decision so that they could add my order to their end of month sales targets? Absolutely no interest in the best phone for my business use.The new phone arrived and it was smaller and more fiddly and not what I needed. I rang up to return it and was told ‘You can’t return it to us. Orange won’t allow it. You’re going to have to sell it on Ebay and then go out to a store and look for another phone’. Amazed at this, I rang Orange who told my comms supplier in no uncertain terms that they were in breach of the Distance Selling Regulations. So they lost a good long term customer because they were lazy, avaricious and deceitful.
{ 4 trackbacks }