How to End Internal Marketing Conflict and Put the Customer Experience First
Beyond the Customer Custody Challenge
InfoManagement Direct, October 17, 2008
As companies grow, merge and acquire, it is common that they subdivide their marketing efforts into multiple compartments. For instance, a financial services company may have a retention unit in the credit card division and another in brokerage. A telecom provider may be trying to cross-sell its cable services, while the cable division is running its own special. Sound familiar? It’s the “more the merrier” view of marketing, and if your company subscribes to it - think again. What might seem like harmless overlap is actually a “custody fight” for customers that results in disjointed messages, clouded ability to measure marketing efforts effectively and a source of endless annoyances to your customers. A cohesive vision, aided with technology, allows marketing, sales and service to “share” custody of clients leading to less waste, more profit and happier customers.
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The customer custody challenge is the outgrowth of a tremendous increase in products, services and brands; fueled by deregulation (for some markets), innovation, and mergers and acquisitions. Financial institutions now offer everything from credit cards to wealth management services. Telcos provide an array of wireless, voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP), data and video services. Retailers have multiple brands and multiple ways (in-store, catalog and Internet) for consumers to shop. But a company’s most valued asset - its customer relationships - is often at risk as various business units struggle for ownership and face time with customers through various communication channels. Customer relationships are managed in a fragmented way out of separate departments and profit and loss centers. The departments might also engage separate agencies and employ different data resources in their decision-making.
This article explains how organizations came to fight over customers and what companies can do to end the custody battles and provide a unified message that will be cost-effective and pleasing to the customer.
Falling into the Customer Custody Trap
If your company is facing a customer custody challenge, it’s likely for one key reason - you’ve been successful. You’ve successfully transitioned from an emphasis on acquiring customers to increasing customer value through retention, upsell and cross-selling offers. You’ve acquired competitors, created new divisions, mastered Internet sales and segued away from product-centricity to a focus on the customer. Companies with these custody issues have likely successfully deployed customer resource management tools, managed large volumes of data on customer interaction and analyzed it. You have likely mastered some degree of personalized or targeted marketing. In other words, you’ve done a lot of things right. But the bar has been raised. Customers demand that the interactions with any business be a positive, hassle-free experience in every channel they use. They also anticipate being presented with options that are relevant to their needs and that those options will be presented at appropriate times. Customers expect that companies will provide service as a unified entity that understands all the relationships it has with them.
The Misery of the Mixed Message
Companies’ ability to deliver on customer expectations has not caught up. As companies grew, acquired and worked on customer-centric messaging, they inadvertently strayed from a cohesive message and ended up with a smorgasbord of misaligned messages. Multiple contacts with customers by different parts of the organization inevitably lead to revenue being counted more than once. Meanwhile, the disjointed messaging puzzles the consumer and erodes the relationship. Here’s an experience we’ve heard from plenty of people: you call a provider to change a service or add a service, and you are quoted a price. While you are on hold, you hear the same service being quoted at a lower price. There are a number of possible reasons for this. A company might have segmented you as a less profitable customer and thus decided to charge more - in which case someone needed to tell the marketing group that created the on-hold message about the possible conflict. Or, the service division could have one price list, while a retention or cross-sell group creates and pushes messages with different prices. It doesn’t matter what the reason is - the result is that you don’t think very highly of the organization.
Customer custody issues can be just plain irritating to the overwhelmed consumer. High on the list of irritants are a constant stream of email or paper mail with offer after offer - each originating from divisions that have no idea who else is contacting the same customer and with what offers. How often have you ended up blocking email from a company with whom you enjoy doing business - and from whom you would like to get offers - because they simply sent too many?
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