Seth Godin made a very important point today about the way businesses deal with their customers who call, and he could very well have said the very same thing about replying to e-mail. Seth writes about how he calls to complain about what he perceives to be a drop in the quality of his favourite luxury black chocolate, and what he gets is a coupon for a replacement bar of “the same mediocre product [he] was calling to complain about.” Result: one unhappy customer and a lost chance to get some important feedback from where it really matters.
Granted that in today’s day and age, people can buy your products automatically online without ever speaking to you directly. But when a call or e-mail comes in, it is a golden opportunity to communicate with a person who’s receptive to what you have to say and so win over a new client - or retain an old one, as the case may be. In fact, with many businesses, all the marketing you do is just a prelude to that coveted enquiry or lead - the perfect chance for you to engage in a round of permission marketing, because this time your potential client is contacting you.
Seth writes:
Think for a minute about how much you spend (and how high up in the organization the discussions go) when it’s time for a new logo or a new Super Bowl ad.
And yet, even though the rules have changed, the lowest-paid, least-respected, highest-turnover jobs in the organization now do the most important marketing work.
The most important marketing work, of course, being answering calls and e-mails.
So, who is answering your company’s phone calls and e-mails? What sort of treatment are your customers getting when they get in contact with you? Are you showing a genuine interest in your customer’s concerns? And maybe most importantly, are you listening to what your customers are trying to tell you and learning from the experience?
If your business calls and e-mails are being answered by a string of phone operators or secretaries who change every few months, maybe you should consider the implications of giving them this all-important job. Seth suggests that maybe someone in marketing should be doing the job and, while this may not be practical for many businesses, some sort of compromise would be a good idea.
The thing is that the best marketing in the world will fall flat on its face if what your customer finds when she calls is a phone operator who seems to be instructed to get rid of her as quickly as possible or offer an ‘out of the box’ solution - all the more so if she had to spend an eternity on hold to get in touch in the first place. And the same applies to those cold, standard e-mail replies.
Seth ends his post by saying:
The goal of every single interaction should be to upgrade the brand’s value in the eye of the caller and to learn something about how to do better, not to get the caller to just go away.
How is your company faring in this regard? Maybe you should make a call or two, or write a couple of e-mails, and find out for yourself!
