The price of everything, the value of nothing and customer service
By Leo Valiquette
Customer service, and the lack thereof, is a recurring topic on this blog, and for good reason. As public relations and marketing consultants, we appreciate the profound impact that a poor experience with your brand can have on a customer’s willingness to come again or refer your products and services to others. We may not be customer service experts, but we are active consumers who regularly engage with the front-line staff of numerous brands. And it’s what happens on the front lines that matters most.
Francis said it best in a past post, Kudos for empowered customer service:
“My consistent points are that the cost of acquiring customers is almost always far higher than the cost of keeping them, that effective customer service is the only sustainable competitive differentiator, and that most customer-service operations fail by forcing their agents to be powerless automatons more interested in getting the customer off the line than actually servicing them.”
If your customers do not feel well-served on the front line, your marketing messaging, no matter how well-crafted, will not save you. Your brand reputation is built, not by words, but by the actions of your team at every point of contact, from the reception desk to order fulfilment and after-sales support. The purpose of the words crafted by the marketing team is to evangelize the great service you provide. As marketing consultants we can’t create something from nothing and in the age of social media, what smacks of hypocrisy can come under harsh, and very public, criticism quite fast.
