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hi guys ian johnson from driversuccess.com today i want to talk about why your company's customer service strategy has to start with your marketing and sales department and this may be you know pretty redundant for a lot of companies it's pretty obvious that you've got it you've got to manage customer relationships from the outset but a lot of times i see companies especially some of my customers and the biggest mistake that they make is that they basically define goals and objectives key performance indicators metrics benchmarks what have you that are different for each department okay and there's reasons for that however what ends up happening is it ends up pushing a customer along from marketing sales all the way to customer service until that point in time by the time customer service gets them there's just nothing that they can do to keep that customer satisfied so i want to go over basically responsibilities typically associated with marketing sales and customer service and i'm going to explain some of the things that can happen when when the message you send to your market is contradictory or not entirely accurate or a complete falsehood and the damaging effects that it can have on your company okay so very quickly when you talk about marketing marketing obviously is measured on its ability to increase market share product launches they got to get customers interested in the product offering they've got it got to get out to get a message to market that that basically incites customers to move forward so and you know that message to market basically encompasses the company's value proposition and i did a video a while back about the importance of using a value chain analysis to define your company's value and making sure that that's a portion of your marketing strategy but ultimately marketing is measured on its ability to produce qualified leads and it has to produce qualified leads it's got to find customers that are really interested in the product and they've got to hand that off to sales in order for sales to make the sale itself okay so sales obviously sales is measured on sales they're measured on gross profit a lot of times companies uh expect them to maintain a certain gross profit margin on sales uh ultimately the responsible customer retention uh and you know their goal when i put here incumbent status their goal is to become the incumbent supplier okay it's not just the sale in front of them they want to position themselves to close that sale but get the customer to come back for more and you know we've all heard about how a repeat customer or an existing customer is four times less expensive than finding a new customer so we all know the importance of retaining existing customers customer service well obviously they're measured on customer satisfaction customer retention but really honestly there a lot of times they're measured on cost control and if you operate in a business to business market a perfect example of something like this would be you know you may you may have a situation where your customers have to pay for freight on all of their shipments but if you've done something wrong and if you've had a stock out or you didn't have the product available or a quality issue or if you've not properly serviced the customer ultimately sometimes you have to absorb the cost of freight you say the customer don't worry we'll cover the freight this time well that's a direct impact on your cost to serve as a customer so customer service yes they're responsible for keeping customers happy but there's this constant issue with cost control keep the customers happy within reason okay so what happens when marketing goes out to produce qualified leads and they're basically pushed by the company's management to generate as many qualified leads as possible well they'll do that they'll go out and they'll get as many qualified leads as possible but perhaps their marketing message is as i mentioned earlier based on falsehoods or misleading statements and it's not immediately obvious what the damaging effects on that is but eventually it's going to cost your company money so management a lot of times says we really want people to be excited about this product tell them it does this tell them it does that we haven't quite got there yet but if we get customers interested by the time they come around we'll be ready and of course if that doesn't happen it's a huge cost to the company so the marketing goes out when they produce qualified leads not entirely truthful with their statements customer gets excited and those qualified leads goes over to sales okay these these needs go over to sales now you think about it from a sales perspective they get this opportunity to make a sale they're measured on sales the company has told them that they're qualified the lead is qualified who are they to question it and in most cases they don't question it in most cases they just say you know what my job is to sell the company says it's a qualified lead i got to take them at their word some of the things that the customer is asking for we really kind of probably don't do and maybe our product doesn't actually do that but you know sales are important i'm measured on sale so i'm going to close it and in a lot of case sales just like forget it you know customer service will take care of it after so sales close the sale and the customer goes over to customer service and this is where everything falls apart and this is where your customer retention is impacted because by the time it gets to customer service your customer has been sold on a message that perhaps is not truthful they've not been told by sales any differently but now customer service is forced to manage this customer whose expectations can't possibly be attained because of the falsehoods from marketing and because sales inability to basically say that's not what we can do okay and this happens a lot and by the time it gets here you've got a customer who's upset not terribly impressed and in the worst case they feel like to so you're not going to retain them and your costs to service are going to go up so how do you stop this type of thing from happening well you know perhaps it goes without saying that you shouldn't really focus on falsehoods in marketing you should focus on the true aspect of what your product or service can offer um but barring that just you know keeping that in mind one way to stop this from happening is to create a stop gap measure at sales and empower your sales people to say you know i know you think it's a qualified lead but the reality is it really isn't so the first the first step is number one stop gap measure okay empower sales to say this isn't going any further because it's not a qualified lead okay measure everybody on gross profit on customer retention the whole team should be measured on customer retention because the reality is is that managing a customer's expectations is the single most important aspect of sales and growing market share and retaining customers so if you measure everybody on customer retention it means that the message sent from marketing makes sense it means that sales is properly selling the customer and is supporting uh marketing in terms of its message and it means that customer service is probably you know keeping the customer satisfied what have you so have a stopgap measure and i'll put a little star here at sales okay and third i mean i mentioned it earlier but stop the falsehoods okay stop the falsehoods okay don't look i know you may believe that if you send a message to market that you've got this great product you're going to get a lot of interest that's true your customers are going to end up feeling like you haven't been truthful with them okay they're and if they go through from marketing to sales all the way to customer service your company will pay for it eventually i guarantee it it's going to happen and if you want to keep your customers you got to start off in the right foot so remember customer service starts with marketing and sales come up with common objectives for each one of these departments and you know empower your people to raise a red flag if they come across issues that need to be addressed so that's it ian johnson driver success dot com bye-bye