Don’t recoil from customer contact…
Your ’Gambling on the future…article (MW 10 March) rightly said that one of the things brands need to do to prosper in this digital age is get their customer service right. Great customer service promotes brand affinity and drives customer satisfaction. Put simply, it boosts the bottom line. Yet, customer service as we know it is often designed to fail.
A strange paradox exists: organisations see inbound contact as generally undesirable and spend vast sums to keep callers away from the call centre, yet the marketing team spend a fortune trying to reach the same customers through ads, direct mail etc. Rather than seeing it as a threat, brands should be embracing customer contact and using it to strengthen relationships.
Convenience is the new battleground. Brands need to understand how consumers want to communicate and build customer service around that, not the organisation’s requirements.
Simon Loopuit
CEO, VoxGen
