Have you ever wondered what role market and sales plays in your company’s approach to customer service? Maybe you’ve always assumed that a company’s customer service strategies were separate from its marketing and sales strategies. It's a common mistake. It's also the reason why customers receive mixed messages and ultimately why they become annoyed and confused by contradictory statements made by marketing, sales and customer service. Marketing promotes one approach, sales promotes another and customer service is left to pick up the pieces.
Marketing Determines Customer Service Strategy
Ideally, you company’s customer service approach starts first with marketing, followed by sales and then finally by your company’s after sales service support. In essence, marketing’s message is to establish the company’s service criteria and provide sales with qualified leads based on those criteria. Sales closes those leads and then customer service provides support.
Therefore, all three should play a vital role in a company’s customer service strategy. The question now becomes, are your company’s three players properly aligned or do they operate with different doctrines?
A company’s customer service isn't merely what its customer service department does, but more a combination of how its marketing and sales works together with customer service in order to deliver one clear, concise message to the company’s customers.
In essence, it’s about managing the company’s message to market and ensuring all three functions operate with one sole purpose. Since each of these positions play a vital role in managing customer relationships, they should all fall under the company’s singular customer service approach.
An Example of a Contradictory Service Message
Let’s assume your marketing department has revamped your company’s website with a number of updated product and feature benefits. Marketing wants to incentivize leads and therefore uses prompts within the website to get customers to move forward on an inquiry. For marketing, it’s all about having a “call to action”. However, that call to action isn’t in line with the company’s business model or what the company can currently offer. The website claims stock is available upon request, or at the very least, available with minimal lead times. In reality, the product itself is rarely stocked. Unfortunately, marketing can’t afford to convey this message for fear of turning customers away. For marketing, it's about creating a lead.
For sales, it's about selling product that's available to sell. From the outset, marketing's strategy isn't aligned with sales. Does this affect how the company services its customer base? Absolutely! So, should marketing and sales play a more vital role in your company's overall customer service strategy? The answer is a resounding yes, they should.
Any customer can immediately pinpoint the discrepancies between the company’s marketing message and what sales and customer service can actually deliver. However, it goes beyond that. A number of companies don’t align their inventory management practices with their business model ,or their customers’ purchase requirements. In this case, marketing wants to create immediate leads by providing a promise the company, its sales and its customer service department, can’t possibly deliver on.
Now, is this the best way to start off a new customer relationship? Is it a good idea to promise something the company is unwilling or unable to provide? Of course not! At the very least, it’s misleading and at worst, a lie. While your company may have honest intentions, to the customer, it’s something else entirely.
Learn about how a value chain analysis can simplify your company's message to its market and its customers.
How the Contradictory Service Message Impacts Customer Relationships
Let’s keep with our example above. So, what happens when these conflicting strategies come together? Well, marketing has incentivized the customer with their "call to action" by promising something the company can't deliver. The lead is there, but is it something sales can close on? Probably not. However, sales doesn’t want to lose the opportunity. Instead of turning the customer away, the salesperson concentrates on delivering a completely different message, one focused on providing the customer with a product the company can offer, has inventory of, but one the customer doesn't necessarily want or need.
Marketing claims to have provided a “qualified lead” and since it’s the job of sales to close that lead, the salesperson will be forced to do one of two things – 1) admit the error on the website and state that product isn't in inventory, essentially making the company “look bad” and possibly losing the lead for good, or 2) assume a reactionary position predicated on promising something the company can’t deliver. It’s the second option that causes the most problems. Faced with an upset customer, the salesperson capitulates and tries their best to manage the customer's expectations from a position of weakness. So, who is left to make this work? Customer service. Only customer service is left to deal with a customer who will inevitably be upset and whose expectations can never be met.
In the above scenario, marketing has conveyed one message. That message has forced sales into either making a promise they can't keep or turning the customer away. Unfortunately, the customer service department is left with picking up the pieces.
This scenario plays itself out everyday with companies that don’t properly align their marketing, sales and customer service strategies into one cohesive plan, one message to market, and one singular customer service strategy. Messages must be managed the same way a company manages its customer relationships. To deliver a convoluted and confusing message means the company isn’t properly managing its customer's expectations.
Managing client expectations is the single most important aspect of establishing new relationships. Starting off that new relationship with a conflicting strategy does nothing more than annoy & confuse. Find out what message you want to deliver to your customers. Next, focus on how your company can best deliver that message and how it can best service customers. Start with marketing, follow through with sales and then close with customer service & support. Be sure that your “message” is the same.
When a company has strong cohesion between these three functions, it’s always in a better position to manage its internal and external relationships. However, when one party approaches customer service differently from the other, or more importantly, when the strategy itself is fractured, problems are sure to arise.
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