It’s time for the CMO, marketers and call center leaders to work together and change customer communications forever.
Gartner famously predicted that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. Even as this battle rages, marketing remains disconnected from what is going on in a very important part of the marketing and sales funnel -- the call center.
Businesses spent over $300 billion in call center labor costs alone in 2013; but for customers, the experience is horrible. Waiting, listening to Muzak, press 1 for this, 2 for that ... it's a negative drag on the brand, and marketing is now starting to pay attention. Most businesses don't know how bad it is. According to Forrester's "Customer Experience Index," 80% of companies say they deliver "superior" customer service, while 8% of people say the same companies actually deliver "superior" customer service. This disconnect has a significant impact on brand impression and retention – making this a key issue that CMOs are now finding imperative to address.
Here are three things communications and call center professionals can do immediately to prepare.
Buy Lunch for Your CMO
CMOs around the world spent $100 billion in 2013 to drive brands through online advertising. Billions more are spent measuring the success of campaigns using agencies, analytics and marketing automation. Every digital touchpoint is measured and attributed, and digital marketing has become an extremely data-driven scientific endeavor. Yet customers and prospects make 45 billion calls each year to businesses. That's 45 billion customer interactions that have a huge impact on metrics that are critical to the CMO: customer acquisition cost, satisfaction, conversion rate, churn and net promoter score. It's frightening to think that, in general, these customer interactions are completely invisible to the CMO.
The good news is that you – call center and communications professionals – have great data on those interactions. Yet when I meet with our customers for the first time, I quite often find myself introducing their marketing and call center folks to each other. So make the call yourself! Start the conversation between your marketing and call center colleagues, and hatch a joint plan to improve your customers' experience.
Before your lunch, make sure you have done your research on marketing automation, big data, predictive analytics, recommendation engines, content marketing, prospect nurturing, and customer journey optimization. If you have not worked with these concepts before, you will be surprised at how rapidly marketing has become a science; you'll also be surprised at the enterprise budgets now being spent on these activities, and the tight alignment with key business revenue and brand objectives. This is why marketing is eating IT.
Change the Channel
"Channel thinking" is killing customer experience. By channel thinking, I mean the practice of compartmentalizing your interactions with customers into silos: Web, mobile, email, social and voice. This is a company-centric way of thinking about your customers and has the effect of hard-coding friction into the customer experience.
The latest buzzword from the world of channel thinking is "Omnichannel." This is essentially an approach of trying to stitch together all the channels with an expensive overlay of communications and marketing automation software. But papering over the cracks won't work: We need to put the customer journey at the center. We need to change the channel or at least give the customer the remote!
Get started by mapping out your customer journeys and focus on removing seams and friction from interactions - start with a blank sheet of paper. Allow your customers to choose how, when and where they communicate with you. Why do they have to keep changing channels? Build context with an objective of knowing what they want before they want it. The convergence of data analytics and communications makes this possible. This is not rocket science, it's data science!
Get Ready to Rumble
Your organization will change. As channels disappear into a single customer experience, previously separate marketing, online commerce, physical store and call center organizations are going to merge. We are already seeing leading organizations starting to bring these functions under a single executive. This is the wave of the future involving a convergence of organizations, technologies and, of course, budgets. Spend that was formerly controlled by IT will come under the line of business or the CMO. You can either resist this change or lead it.
We have seen this movie before. The VoIP disruption of 15 years ago was as much about CIOs and networking organizations absorbing pure telecom organizations as it was about the technology. The more recent unified communications convergence led to the merging of desktop and communications teams. And now collision between marketing and the call center will lead to the biggest budget and organizational shift yet. The $300 billion of spend at stake will drive this change, and we need to get ready.
So put together a plan for improving customer experience by eliminating channel thinking. Experiment with new technologies that bring together mobile, Web and call center journeys into a seamless experience. Show how eliminating silos in your current organization can free up budget for customer experience. Be the spokesperson, cheerleader and champion for change. The only alternative is irrelevance.
Change is challenging but also represents a huge opportunity. Imagine if each one of your company's annual call center interactions had a positive impact on your customers' experience -- improving loyalty, net promoter score, churn rates and conversions. Imagine being a part of demonstrating this to your CMO and CEO through precise metrics and good analytical models that are tied to your marketing and brand initiatives.
Marketers are laser focused on providing the most relevant content to the right customers at the right point in the funnel. But your best (and most expensive) content is your people and their expertise. By integrating your call center employees into your organization's content marketing strategy, you can consistently make the right communications offers to your mobile and Web customers. In addition, you can deliver mobile and Web context to your employees so that they are empowered to help your customers achieve the desired outcome.
The prize is huge. It's time for the CMO, marketers and call center leaders to work together and change customer communications forever.
Barry O'Sullivan also discussed these topics on stage with Fred Knight at Enterprise Connect 2014 in the Disrupter Conversation on Transforming the Customer Experience (see video here). A marketing-focused version of this article was previously published at sandhill.com.
