October 19, 2009

Customer Contact: A Moment of Strategic Opportunity

A BE DiFFERENT Strategic Game Plan for an organization morphs its marketing function into Customerization where Customer Learning is critical Customer Learning from my book is a continuous process of gaining insights into the customer groups you have chosen to serve. It is a process that seeks to mine out as much information as possible from each time you organization touches the chosen customer. The more secrets you discover, the better off you are in terms of creating Holistic Value-based Offers that address the broad range of requirements each customer has.

A customer contact needs to be viewed as a Moment of Strategic Opportunity. Contact employees simply cannot be allowed to ‘do their own thing’ during a Moment of Truth’ with the chosen customer. Everyone will have their own approach which can be deadly in terms of strategic value being produced. Some will get it right while others won’t, leaving mixed results and probably confused customers.

Rather, the contact moment with the customer must be engineered to extract the secrets the organization wants to discover. Algorithms require development to do this and training applied to ensure that all employees from service, call center and sales functions know their role and act consistently to acquire the critical information necessary to execute its Strategic Game Plan.

Furthermore the behaviors expected must be integrated in contact employees performance plans and any bonus pay programs. If compensation isn’t affected the chances are that little progress will be made.

And don’t forget technology. Applications need to be developed in the same vein. They need to gather secrets in the same way people do. Your web site, e-mail marketing programs, Twitter posts all need to treat a customer exposure as a strategic opportunity.

So, define your secret gathering action plan and design the customer contact to deliver to your BE DiFFERENT learning goals:
- what is said to the customer
- the interaction process with the customer
- the behaviors expected of the contact employee
- the secret categories of information desired

Make it simple otherwise people won’t follow it. A check-list is a good place to start along with a process flowchart that paints a picture of what the interaction looks like when it is being done right.

Cheers, Roy Osing

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Posted 10.19.09 at 05:50 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment