We have been focusing on this quite a bit lately and internally as an organization. It’s an interesting exercise to see if you are truly customer centric or customer service oriented or neither? For example here is what we are trying to do with good Customer Centric behavior based upon a recent client issue. One Director of Marketing client in particular has been trying to apple to apple compare us to another teleprospecting organization since he currently manages both organizations for two unique business units. Unfortunately it’s hard to do because the campaigns, systems and approaches are different and they are for two different business groups that each teleprospecting vendor is supporting that are unique. It appears that daily reporting is trumping our results (over-delivery by 30% of goal) to date. So we see that our client is very interested in that functionality. Not sure we see it that way but the customer does so why not give them what they want?
In this case we are but he isn’t communicating. Our CEO became engaged as we always treat each customer with the same respect and focus large or small as we value ALL OF OUR CLIENTS. Unfortunately the client has not been responsive from the Marketing side. The VP of Sales on the other hand has been and he continues to be very engaged. Once again we see a great divide between what is important to sales and what marketing finds important and they are clearly not aligned. This makes being Customer Centric even more difficult for a teleprospecting vendor like Extended Presence.
So for now we have shifted to supporting sales as closely as possible and waiting for marketing to reengage. From a Customer Centric position we are going to proactively give the marketing client probably more than he is receiving and we have dedicated our own resources (financially and operationally) to proactively raise the bar for this customer. We are going to make working with us even more unique, memorable and anticipate his next request. That is Customer Centric behavior.
The least customer centric story we have heard lately, has two interesting parts to it with regards to customer service and customer centric behavior or in this case the lack of it. This was provided by an outsourced CMO who met with our CEO, who has a client where the VP of Marketing had two hard deadlines with his Ad Agency for the Friday before Memorial Day. His agency failed to deliver both projects and let him know it would be after the holiday an hour after they were due that morning. When he looked up their Facebook page, he found that the whole company had escaped to a party that afternoon at a famous Colorado Landmark where Jack Nicholson was appearing to celebrate the 30th year anniversary of the movie The Shining. Not very customer centric and if we were that VP of Marketing we would be shifting to a vendor who is customer centric and has good customer service to boot, oh and one that can hit deadlines!
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