Monthly Archives: January 2008

Marketing through Operations

Analytical Culture, Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations

OK, so to review, here’s the premise.  Customer-centricity is something companies want to embrace more than ever.  Company can do this through a Chief Customer Officer, but why isn’t a Marketing exec taking the reins on this issue?  In direct marketing companies – where customer-centricity is not just a fad, but has a decades-long history – the Marketing folks know that Operations typically contains a goldmine of customer-centric Marketing opportunities they can take advantage of.  Many of these opportunities come from problems with empathy and context – or for the more technical folks out there, “Usability”.

Yes, you can optimize the service side of a business just like you can optimize a web site.  Here is how:

1.  Do you have a relationship with a peer in customer service?  If not, that’s really short-sighted for a marketing person who wants to be viewed as a strategic thinker – find someone, OK?

2.  Does customer service record the reason for each call?  If not, that’s nuts.  Most every call center system provides this capability, but you do have to turn the damn module on and populate it with the reasons people call.  So if the center is not using this functionality, get talking about how to get it turned on.

3.  You and your customer service peer need a list of the reasons people call.  Get this by talking, of course, with the agents.  If such a list does not exist, create it.  If such a list does exist, review it – it’s probably filled with crap or default reasons that don’t really have much to do with your business.  This is the most common mistake I see made in the “customer centric” area – using default call reasons not customized for the business.

4.  Once you have the module running and the call reasons right, make sure the agents know how important it is to status every call correctly.  Tell them by statusing calls, you plan to make their jobs easier by reducing routine problem calls, allowing them to spend more time on quality of call and resolving complex issues.

5.  Determine how to report on compliance with correct statusing.  If you don’t do this, all your effort will be subject to failure.  Hint: Do not provide agents with a giant “other reason” bucket; force accurate call accounting by providing a full and complete call reason set that only allows a very small percentage of “other reason” ticks.

6.  Find out from Customer Service or Finance what the internally acceptable “cost per call” calculation is; what does Finance think it costs to take a customer service call?

7.  In conjunction with customer service, study the reasons people call and think about how to reduce the need for those callers to call.  This project is about reducing or eliminating the triggers for a call.  Why do they call?  FYI, most really customer-centric companies have a meeting on this topic every week.  At HSN, we had this meeting every day.  Why?  Because we could react in real time.  If you are in an interactive business, perhaps you can too.

8.  In many cases, you will find they call because of things marketing does or could affect, for example:

  • Confusing language or other problems with marketing materials / advertising – this is a huge category which includes all kinds of bad Marketing execution – wrong or expired coupon codes, collateral distribution problems, etc.
  • Incomplete or confusing instructions or product packaging
  • Incomplete or confusing installation process or procedures
  • Pricing or bundling logic issues – the options don’t make sense to the customer
  • Problems with call center script language or logic
  • Illogical touch-tone trees or branching problems
  • All kinds of similar problems with the web site too numerous to mention here

Note to web analysts reading this:

Sound familar?  After you optimize the web site, find out if they will let you join the BI unit and optimize the business.  Idea: Optimizing a VRU / IVR is really no different than optimizing a web site using path analysis – think about it.  Traffic sources, the funnel, leaky bucket, pogo-sticking.  Same thing.

9.  Get off your GRP-lovin’ ass and fix the operational problems Marketing is causing or can affect.

If you are saying to yourself, “But I don’t have control over a lot of the items on this list” then ask yourself why that is.  All this stuff is about copy and presentation, and heck, you’re the expert in those areas, right?  So why don’t you have control over these issues?  Did you ever ask for this control?  If not, why?  That’s what a strategic thinker would do, because all these customer contact issues directly affect customer value and retention.

This stuff is marketing.  It directly affects the value of the customer and customer retention, not to mention word-of-mouth.  You want that new fangled social media thingie you bought to boost sales, right?  How about optimizing the customer experience with your company?

Oh, I forgot, less than 30% of you said increasing customer LifeTime Value is a top marketing objective.  So I guess less than 30% of you should move to the next step.

10.  Measure the reduction in phone calls for these problem areas you have fixed, calculate the cost savings, present to senior management.

Extra credit: measure the increase in customer satisfaction, if that’s all you can do.  Better than nothing.  Hopefully you have some kind of statistically correct, longitudinal study going and can measure satisfaction properly.

Super extra credit: measure the actual reduction in customer defection and monetary value of this reduction.  That’s the right thing to do and will boost the monetary value of your actions tremendously.

11.  Pitch strategic seat at the table / Chief Customer Officer responsibilities using knowledge from “why they call” study and resulting operational modifications.  You will have no shortage of future issues to work on.  Somebody has to do it, might as well be you.

12.  Convene cross-functional team, you will need it.  Get best and brightest from every area of the company or unit.  At minimum:  Marketing / Sales, Customer Service, Finance, IT, Distribution

13.  Start fixing more stuff that pisses the customer off, generates calls, and truncates customer value.  Achieve customer centricity.  After all, they tell you every single day what pisses them off.

Why don’t you fix this stuff?

Any takers?  Anybody doing this?  Any Marketers think they will get resistance if they start poking their nose into customer service land?

 

CMO’s: Strategic Seat = Chief Customer Officer

Brand Management, DataBase Marketing

Pursuing Ron’s analysis of Forrester’s Evolved CMO study, and it being the Year of the Customer (again), a couple of things seem clear.  

The lack of, or loss of, a strategic role for the CMO – the Deconstruction of Marketing – comes at the same time the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) concept is ascending.  Given an environment accepting of the CCO idea, why would any CMO aspiring to a strategic seat simply let this CCO opportunity slip away?  Clearly the CCO is a strategic seat, and a combination of Marketing and Customer Service responsibility isn’t unrealistic in a customer-centric org.

So I’m left with this: Do most Marketers have the required empathy to run customer service?  Do they have the capability to get down with people interaction, as opposed to blasting the nameless, faceless masses with messages?

In the spirit of not being a Consultainer, I’d like to provide some concrete direction to any Marketing folks who might be looking to “Prove that you deserve” a seat at the Strategic table.  The logical entry point is through this CCO idea.

The first question I would ask myself is this: Do I have control over all the Marketing, everywhere in the company?  Or have I ceded control of some Marketing issues to different operational groups?

For example, did Marketing write or approve the call center scripts?  How about the pathing logic and language used in the IVR / VRU?  Do you control the look and feel of invoices and packing slips?  How about installation or assembly instructions, are they easy to follow and do they use customer-friendly language? 

What about service counters, what does the signage look like?  Is there a good flow, do customers understand where to go and what to do?  Is the collateral up to date?  How are customers greeted?

All of the above is Marketing in a customer-centric world where relevance and authenticity is critical.  As a Marketing person, you’re an expert on language, copy, and presentation (if not emotion and empathy as well).

Why is it not your duty to bring these skills to all the customer-facing activities your company engages in?  Is it possible the customer service manager or IT programmer is better than you are at creating a great-looking, customer friendly, value-added packing slip?  If so, that strategic seat is something you will have to give up.

If you want a seat at the strategic table, you have to prove you understand the operational side of the business, and how you can affect it positively with great marketing ideas outside of the marketing silo.  Special bonus and faster advancement for actually measuring and proving the positive effects Marketing can have on the operational side of the business.

In fact, I will tell you that in many cases, your Marketing is not working as well as it should because you have not been influencing the operational side; here’s a real world example.  More real world examples here and here and here and here.

I will give you a specific plan for taking action on this CCO idea that will work at most companies in the next post.

P.S.  And don’t get me started on packing slips – have you ever actually seen one from your company?  Would it help to know that 95% of the ones I see from e-commerce companies that are not catalogers are little more than a copy of the order confirmation e-mail?  With all the e-mail header crap and all included?  No logo, no brand gestalt, no helpful information, no upsell suggestions?  How’s that working for a “customer experience”?

What about you?  Do you stick to “Marketing”, or do you shove your nose into the Operations side and get Marketing things done in Customer Service, Fulfillment, and other operational areas? 

Lab Store: Panic Pack!

Lab Store, Marketing / Tech Interface

The average ecommerce / catalog packer can pack about 22 – 25 boxes an hour, depending on the level of automation.  Of course, we don’t have anything like traditional mail order automation in the Lab Store; just a computer, a printer and my wife Barb as Chief Packer & Chief Customer Officer.  I pitch in by assembling products and generally keeping the “warehouse” shelves stocked so the Chief can do her thing with the packages and customers.

For a variety of reasons we got a late start today packing the orders from over the weekend and New Year’s Eve / Day, and had to invoke a “Panic Pack” on these 131 orders.  A Panic Pack is a high speed affair where Barb picks all the orders but leaves some for me to pack (I suck at packing compared with her) while she packs the others.  We packed all 131 orders in 4 hours, just barely in time for UPS pickup.

UPS Receipt

That might not sound like a big deal versus the 25 boxes an hour, but remember we are also picking the orders and dealing with all the customer service – can you add this to my order, can you change my shipping method, etc.  Most packers simply pack an order that has already been picked for them, and don’t do any customer service.

131 packages

My point with this post is not that we know how to pack like banshees, but the enabling technology behind this capability.

It would have been impossible to pack and manage the service with this many orders in such a short time without a proper backend order management system – something I see many ecommerce folks go without.  Most web-based cart back-ends are incredibly difficult to deal with, especially on order changes.

In many web-based order processing systems, it can take multiple steps to make simple changes rather than just a few clicks – add another product to an order, run another credit card charge, reprint the packing slips, etc.  This is because once an order is processed, it’s not meant to be changed; order changes were not taken into account when these systems were designed.  Nobody talked to customer service to get specs, I guess…

“You mean customers might want to change an order they already placed?  Why?”  ‘Cause most of them are not geeks.  They make mistakes.  They forget stuff.

Often, when you call companies using these systems to add products to your order, they tell you “we can’t” and to go online and place another order.  Nice.  Great service.

We actually don’t mind if customers want to add to orders they have already placed with us – silly, huh?  Gee, you want to spend more money with us?  Sure, bring it on!  By the way, Flat Rate shipping encourages this behavior.

If you have a good backend system, you can just add the product and the software does the rest, because the order has not been “processed” yet as it has with web-based systems – you process the order right before you print the packing slips, including the credit card capture.  And, you can do all kinds of customization on the packing slip, like messaging for new customers, repeat customers, and so forth, and automatically interface with the shipping manifest system.

The labor cost savings alone when using these order management systems is huge.  When we moved from web-based “copy & paste” order management to local software, our time spent per order on customer service dropped by 50%.  This kind of gain in productivity is common, as you can see here.

And when you have more time to service each customer, you  can provide better, more customized service.  Simple as that.

Plus, our backend system creates one heck of a customer database, automatically consolidating orders at the customer level and providing one-click access to customer service history, cumulative sales, and so forth.  Whenever we are faced with a complex service issue, the first thing we do is look at the cumulative sales of the customer, and then we act accordingly.  In other words, for proven good customers, we bend the rules.  That’s how you build loyalty.

So you need a customer database to provide great service.  As far as Marketing goes, you need a customer database to measure the success of customer-centric programs like this one and this one.

If you don’t have a flexible and marketing friendly order management system, you really should consider getting one.  We use Stone Edge.