For Customer Experience, are the skills of your marketing team under utilised ?

In smaller organisations the Product Management function is quite often "owner led" but more often than not - there are specialist Marketing skills either in-house or on retainer. In this scenario I would suggest that Marketing can help by

1. Helping to set and understand the Customers expectation of service delivery
2. Help to better segment and understand the customer base when it comes to service delivery
3. Get better quality feedback around service delivery and help detect and improve outcomes when it comes to silent, and not-so-silent, churn.

Set achievable expected outcomes

Your Marketing Team communicates directly with your customers and sets the customer expectation. Getting this right in part dictates the cost of delivery and the cost of your Net Promoter Score (or your Trustpilot!!) rating. Of course, this has a direct effect on your cost of customer acquisition/customer retention metrics. The Operations Team needs to influence this customer communication and be aware of it. Working with Marketing to ensure that the reality of service delivery plans and capabilities meets the expectations set with the customer. At NetMinded we call the predicted output of the customer expectation vs. the reality equation the "Expected Outcomes" score. As an example - if you say it's a 1Gbps Internet service in your marketing - make sure the operations team has the tools and processes to prove this. And prove it easily! Otherwise - expect a % of your customers to raise concerns and build that into your cost model.

Segment your Customer Base

All customers are not equal. They vary in need, skills and all sorts of different types of "understanding" which itself varies with circumstance. It is a core skill of the marketing team to understand and model these differences. Marketing can complement Product Management here. Marketing has the tools and the skills to build customer personas that can help your Product and Operations team better understand varying needs. Segmentation will help you build modern service communications plans. You can use these plans to build automated data streams that extract (or create), transform and load your service data into the required communication channels. Get the right information to the right people, in the correct format and at the right time.

Get Real time customer feedback

Work with marketing to further improve the customer feedback you need in order to improve. Reduce the silent churn that can undermine the revenue growth of any service provider.

Calls to Action

• Create customer personas specifically for service delivery purposes. Ask the Marketing team to help segment your customer base. Identify the different internal and external stakeholders groups. Look at the skills and organisational gaps. Consider how to build empathy between your experts and your non-expert internal/external customers. Consider how to communicate with these different customer groups. Periodically review these personas with your Marketing colleagues.
• Create new Service Communications Plans. Use the new customer personas to check the way you are communicating about your services. Alter the way you set the expectations with your customers and/or the tools that you have for delivery to create a better balance. Seek to further automate the delivery of Service Communications.
• Set combined metrics. Both Marketing and Operations Teams - and their reporting chains - everyone likes metrics! Set some common metrics to measure progress. Measure success and get further internal support in the process.

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