Posts Tagged ‘Customer Service’

With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us (if you are in the USA) and more holidays ahead, my mind is on the travel industry this morning. Even with all of the TSA debacles, I am sure that many companies in the travel industry are doing their best to stay focused on the customer.

More often, I am seeing “customer-centric” and “outside-in” as becoming interchangeable buzz words for social media and customer service. Please, don’t mistake the two. Customer-centric and outside-in clearly have their beginnings in integrated marketing communications, which demand that data be the core driver in all marketing and customer-based activities.

To be clear, customer-centric doesn’t always mean customer service. But that doesn’t mean that having customer-centric data can’t lead to experiences that include customer service activities. When it comes to customer service, even customer-centric companies will trip up and falter. Why? Because it’s a human-to-human touch point that even the most detailed and modeled data can’t always predict the outcome of. So the next time you claim that a company isn’t customer-centric because you had a bad customer service experience, think about that and also think about how your behavior affected the situation as well.

Today I am sharing some examples of companies in the travel industry that are leading their customer-centric efforts with data that is leading the way to changing their business culture.

SAS.Com Events: Carnival Cruises Along with the Power of Customer Analytics

Enablers of customer centricity:

• Data Foundation
• Targeting and Marketing
• Measurement
• Marketing Performance Management

Keep Reading…

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
• What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
• Do Your Stakeholders Find You Enchanting?
• Designing An Organization from the Outside-In

This is a marketing blog, so why am I reading and sharing customer service articles? Well, because as with all things time and learning leads to change.

And one major change that needs to happen is for us marketing, public relations and communications professionals to pause for a moment to learn from our friends in customer service.

Our customers don’t silo their experiences with us; they never have and never will. Any outreach or interation is from the brand, not from the silo. From that perspective isn’t there value in understanding how servicing the customer at any point of communication or interaction provides an experience that benefits the organization overall all?

As we know, great customer service never goes out of style and below are insights into how companies like Southwest Air, Best Buy and Publix have made a business decision to put the customer in the center of their organization in order to service them better.

1. Retail’s Big Blog: Southwest co-founder shares how to show employees the LUV

“We don’t have any secrets; we are an open book. But every time these companies came in they would want to know ‘what are your programs?’ And I would say over and over—and you could see the shades go down because people didn’t buy it—we don’t have ‘programs’ it’s a way of life. It is who we are. We spend an incredible amount of time hiring the right people who want to do the right thing. But we don’t have programs for handling things.”

Keep Reading, There’s More Goodness!

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• In Search of Integrated Marketing Genius
• Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
• Saturday Morning Reads: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI) of Content Marketing?
• What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)