Do Business Well

Yet today most companies organize their inbound and outbound functions separately. To avoid this, the engaged organization must organize all its marketing, customer service, and support functions into one department. This way, customers visiting the company’s website or receiving email see a single company and a single brand.

There are two primary reasons why it makes sense to combine customer service support and marketing into one department. First, organizing different functions under the same department lets you align their goals and measures of success. When the goal is to build and nurture lasting relationships by engaging customers in an ongoing dialogue, it makes intuitive sense that the inbound and outbound parts of that dialogue come from the same place. Second, most organizations with separate customer service and marketing departments use information systems that probably don’t communicate with each other. This means that marketing doesn’t know a customer’s status with customer service. Is he happy and satisfied or miserable and angry? Could she possibly be turned into a spokesperson for your company? Combining information from different parts of your organization to give you a real-time snapshot of your customers will make your customer communication programs far more effective.

An interesting exercise that can help you understand how organizational boundaries impact customer communication is to identify the parts of the organization that interact with the customer at each stage in the customer life cycle. For instance, which parts of your company are involved in leading a prospect or customer from interest to actual purchase? If the customer receives a highly relevant email from your marketing department and decides to engage, does your website provide him with a pure, self-service experience from there or can he get help in the buying process? What if he has questions while visiting the website—can he connect with a real person and get them answered immediately?

Another boundary you may want to redraw is the one between your marketing and technical departments. Most companies have problems getting their marketing departments and technical teams to communicate with each other effectively and regularly. During my work with Post Communications we frequently discover that a client’s technical people will talk to Post’s technical people, who in turn talk to Post’s account manager. The account manager then speaks with the client’s marketing contacts. In other words, the client’s technical and marketing people frequently have no forum for meeting and communicating. To address this issue, weekly meetings between account managers and technical project managers and the client’s technical and marketing teams are essential. This has been an incredibly effective way of improving communications.

Anointing a “Relationship Czar“

Every engaged organization needs a “relationship czar“—a relationship marketing manager—who is responsible for the integrity of the relationship the organization develops with its members and customers. At Homestore, the person responsible for email direct marketing has a deep background in traditional direct marketing, having spent a significant part of his career at American Express, an acknowledged leader and innovator in offline relationship marketing. He brings extensive experience to his responsibility of coordinating outbound custom and member communication across all of Homestore’s prope ties, including SpringStreet, REALTOR, and Horn Fair. Homestore’s goal is to recognize, reward, and respor to members across all its properties, assisting them with their home-related needs. Homestore wants its customers to understar that whether they’re renting a new apartment, buying their fir home, applying for a new mortgage, or redecorating their home the company is there for them. It will be able to achieve this go only if it recognizes and communicates with its members across a properties and over their entire life span.

Although relationship czar is normally a marketing position, job responsibilities clearly span traditional organizational bound aries, with broad oversight responsibilities for all points of custom contact. Whether a customer drops by a retail store, calls the 80 number to place an order or ask a question, returns a product, visit the website, receives an email, or is contacted by regular mail, the relationship marketing manager is the one who ensures that the organization recognizes the customer and speaks with a single, consistent voice. In a sense, the relationship czar is the intern spokesperson and voice of the customer. Whenever the organization is planning a new program that includes customer contact, the relationship czar acts as the “proxy customer” and should be consulted

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