Guest Blogger: Avoid the Customer Tug of War
Posted by Becky Carroll on August 26th, 2009
As you can probably surmise, I have had a very busy summer and haven’t been able to blog as much as I would like! (Note: You can find me fairly frequently updating on Twitter at twitter.com/bcarroll7). As the summer wraps up, I am scheduling some new posts for you, my loyal readers, which focus on customer service, marketing, customer experience, and social media.
Today I have a guest blogger for you. Sean McDonald was formerly the director of Global Online Activities at Dell and is now a principal at Ant’s Eye View. I love these guys because they are cut from the same cloth as me with a passion for customers. Enjoy Sean’s post on who owns the customer.
Avoid the Customer Tug of War
It used to be simple, customers were the responsibility of sales and customer service – those were the two primary and necessary customer touch points for a business. It worked well from a business perspective, the customer contacted you to buy something or service the product. Apart from these two instances, no dialogue was available or encouraged between the customer and the company.
What has changed is customers have a public voice on the web. Customers always had a voice before, it just was not as expansive before introduction of easy and affordable web technologies (blogs, twitter, UGC video sites). Now with all things “social” becoming vogue for companies, a new questions challenges the status quo:“Who owns the customer?” Is it Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Product Development, PR, Investor Relations, Finance? Answer: is it is everyone’s responsibility to engage with customers. Not every group is an order taker or customer service helpdesk. But customers have questions, ideas that span entire life cycle.
Avoid the tug of war over who owns the customer. Create (within your company) a customer engagement plan in 3 easy steps:
1. Listen and determine what is Relevant – What are the customers discussing today? (packaging, rude retail employees, return policy, friendly environmental practices, etc). Note: Not all conversations are negative.
2. Engage – Pick one topic that is relevant, find that passionate employee that is savvy on the topic and unleash the passionate employee to join and create online conversations. Not sure how to create online conversations, 3 easy ways to get started.
3. Wash, Rinse, Repeat with steps 1 and 2. You will evaluate success on your first topic. What should be your second topic? (again, listen to determine relevance).
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August 27th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
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August 27th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
[...] Guest Blogger: Avoid the Customer Tug of War Found 15 hours, 28 minutes ago As you can probably surmise, I have had a very busy summer and haven’t been able to blog as much as I would like! (Note: You can find me fairly frequently updating on Twitter at twitter.com/bcarroll7). As the summer wraps up, I am scheduling some new posts for you, my loyal readers, which focus on [...] From: customersrock.net [...]
August 31st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Eeesh, I don’t even like the premise of “who owns the customer” question. Yes, I know it comes up in internecine organizational tugs-of-war but gosh, it hurts my stomach …
#1, the customer “owns” herself. He or she or it (if it’s a company we’re talking about) should determine who they want to work with, often various departments and individuals depending on the customer’s need at the moment. But I don’t think a customer wants to be “owned” by any one or any department. After all, the customer is the one footing the bill and paying the salaries; they deserve more respect and appreciation than ownership conveys. We exist to serve customers, not to fight over who serves and speaks and engages with them.
#2, it’s everyone who should be engaging in some way, shape, or form. We should all be focused on helping our customers, delighting them, serving them, responding to them. If we have value to offer, offer it. If not, don’t. So, if the customer has a billing issue, the accounts receivables department. If the customer has a product question or suggestion, maybe product marketing or product development. If it’s a service question or issue: customer service / support. And so on. In other words: everyone, in their correct area of expertise and authority.
By the way: love those folks at Ant’sEyeView too. Thanks for the provocation…
Regards,
Mark Yolton
September 17th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
In my IT experience, ‘who owns the customer’ was a contentious question. It did tend to inspire the entire organization to develop a client by client plan for communicating different types of information. Sales was handled by the Account Manager, technical issues went through the PM, smaller text and placement issues went through the CSR. Still, we all got on the same page before any one of us reached out to the client. In the end, we all ‘owned’ the client.
Thanks for this post!
MAS
October 20th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I don’t like the sound of ‘who owns the customer’ either. ‘Who affects the customer the most’ would be probably a better phrasing. Delegating an employee to deal with customers and company’s issues on social media is quite a good idea once you have such a savvy employee
December 14th, 2009 at 2:13 am
In the midst of rat race competition how do you manage to get your blog noticed? I mean I been trying very hard to bring traffic to my blog but doesent seam to work much any suggestions from you would be helpful?
January 5th, 2010 at 2:33 am
we must be focused on the things that costumers are discussing everytime.
August 16th, 2010 at 8:02 am
I would like to track your future posts on customer service category. I was searching some ideas to come up with a resolution as to my queries relating to better treatment guide for satisfying perspective customers.