A High Quality Customer Experience Comes from Symbiosis between Marketing and the Call Center

In an era in which budgets are shrinking but call centers are expected to improve the quality of multichannel customer service for ever more demanding customers – customers who are now used to instant resolution of problems and take to social media to air their complaints to hundreds or thousands of friends – the pressure on customer service organizations is growing.

These organizations need to find ways to ensure that the customer relationship is preserved at all costs, from first contact to the one hundredth transaction and beyond, particularly in an era of hyper-marketing when many promises are made that need to be kept by customer service. Many smart companies are taking a number of steps to bring this about.

In the old days, marketing and customer service operated rather independently of one another. Customers who called in response to special marketing events often found that call centers were clueless, which quickly damaged a customer’s relationship. Social media campaigns instituted by the marketing department were poorly integrated and supported by the contact center, leaving many companies with an impression of a company disconnect.

“The need for a symbiotic marketing/customer service relationship is… more important now, with consumers increasingly turning to social media as a way to communicate with businesses,” wrote HubSpot in a recent article. For this reason, marketing and the contact center need to build campaigns together, ensuring that their processes complement one another and, more important, support one another.

While it looks great on paper, many companies that have attempted to do so have run into roadblocks. They’ve built marketing programs and hoped the contact center could support them. But as customer service blogger Shep Hyken wrote recently, “When it comes to customer service, hope is not a strategy. Customer service must be purposeful.”

Smart companies transcend marketing and the contact center and build from the function – high quality customer service regardless of channel as a goal – rather than the individual department and its siloed responsibilities. More important, these smart companies don’t build their strategy and hope for the best: they measure, monitor and analyze. While many companies rely on the built in quality monitoring and analytics in their customer service platforms, many go a step further and turn to strategies such as third-party monitoring to ensure that the customer experience is seamless from the first exposure to marketing through to the purchase and beyond.

While the pressure is on to sell more, cross-sell and upsell and support the customer to the degree of excellence he or she expects, it’s not enough to hand the responsibility to a single department. A truly fruitful customer experience management strategy means the entire organization must be on board.

Edited by Rich Steeves

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