Every business of every kind has issues to deal with on a daily basis. It’s quite easy to get bogged down by them and lose focus on what business really is about: making money by delivering to customers what they demand. Whether we are in the B2B or the B2C arena, the principle still remains the same.
Human nature can often make us focus on the more negative and pointless aspects of life and business. The result is that traditional business thinking concentrates upon ‘easy’ aspects of measurable benefit. Such as creating more and more efficiencies that entail rationalising costs whenever possible even when it is the last thing you should do.
The customer, even with regards to the outsourcing craze, seems to have been left behind. Marketers, too, don’t have the respect they need to drive their businesses forward for the benefit of all stakeholders, which include investors and more importantly customers. People with financial backgrounds dominate the boardrooms of the world; they drive the show for short-term profit, and often with little regard to marketing effectiveness.
Marketing is too often equated with marcomms, and not seen as the most vital long-term strategic tool and asset that a company can ever possess. Marketers need to therefore begin to get out of their silos and fight for the rightful place around the board table: they should be drivers for good corporate governance and best practice right across the enterprise.
Total marketing differs from traditional though because it is more holistic and positive in its approach. There’s no point cutting off one of David Beckham’s legs so that he is more efficient, particularly to the extent that he wouldn’t be able to run or score goals. If you are an England football fan, you therefore hope that he is going to be more and more effective with each match. He’s a great footballer already, but everyone must continually go through a process of ongoing improvement. Yet you don’t change what isn’t broken. So you prioritise and change only what will provide your company with significant improvement to your bottom-line benefits.
Total marketing is also demand-driven and so there’s no need to increase productivity for the sake of it. Everything you do must match, reflect and adapt to meet customer demand, needs, wants and desires.
By delivering more effectively to the customer, and by focusing on the core issues that limit and maximise your business performance, you will be able to deliver significantly better results than if you focus solely on cost-cutting. By meeting and not exceeding demand, you will be able to reduce your costs right across the supply and value chain for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Marketers should be more innovative (and live perhaps in Ansoff’s fourth quadrant), accept more accountability, and work more collaboratively with other departments within their companies. The imperative of which is a customer-focus; the delivery of true customer-centricity. Part of this may include a reappraisal of the traditional four Ps of the marketing mix, to include people and processes, technologies, and other elements to become the 10 Ps.
So many customer relationship management implementations fail because the managers responsible did not know how to make the systems work effectively for themselves or their customers (bearing in mind though that CRM is usually equated to a computer process rather than true customer anything). The entire concept over which very few can reach a conclusive agreement about its definition is particularly flawed because it leaves the customer out in the cold. No longer does the customer remain king. They’ve been routed by internally focused processes and self-serving procedures.
Yet many organisations, particularly banks, still claim to be customer-centric. So even when you innovate the delivery and data capture processes with new technologies, you must always make sure that whatever you do improves the customers’ experience.
Too many call and contact centres focus on the wrong means of measuring agent performance. Agents are quite often given just two minutes to answer each call they take, because that will increase misleadingly I add the performance of that agent, although increasing his or her ability to get a bonus.
However, customers end up feeling pushed around and not welcomed. So procurement companies such as Ion Group have adopted a truly customer-centric philosophy by focusing on improving the customers’ experience, measuring the reduction in churn and the creation of lifetime value through extended long-term customer relationships. Here customers can chat with the staff, because this may entice them to buy more products and services. As a result, each party should be able to profit.
