If you are going to do something new, do you have to do it well right off? Or do you get some slack for venturing out?
I’m branching off from another good SIPA marketing forum discussion started by Greg Krehbiel of Kiplinger’s. “I’m starting to think—based on anecdotal evidence—that people are less particular about errors on mobile websites than they are on desktop websites. It’s almost as if mobile websites are so commonly screwy—because of the device or the connection or whatever—that customer expectation is very low.”
Then Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine, agreed, writing, “There is definitely an expectation that full-version sites should work seamlessly and be easy to use, but we don’t yet seem to have that same expectation for mobile sites.”
This led me to an article today in MediaPost News’ Marketing Daily. Aaron Baar writes about a J.D. Power and Associates study examining consumer experience with companies based on social interaction. How are companies doing socially for both marketing and service, and how does that affect customer choices?
“Hardly any companies are doing equally well on social marketing and social servicing,” Jacqueline Anderson, director of social media and text analytics at J.D. Power, told Marketing Daily. She says the discrepancy has a negative impact on brand perception. But of highly satisfied customers, “87% said their online interaction with the company ‘positively impacted’ their likelihood of purchase from that company.” But it’s not as harmful on the other end. Only 10% of dissatisfied customers said that their experiences “negatively impacted” on their purchase decision.
Those numbers actually present a bit of a win-win scenario for you on the social front—and perhaps we can extend that to mobile. Do it well and you’ll be rewarded; do it not so well and there won’t be many deep repercussions. That’s a nice cushion to have, although it probably won’t continue for much longer as technological expectations improve.
The servicing and marketing variances pose another question: Are departments within companies talking to each other enough? At the recent Pre-Conference session in Miami on sales, Dan Oswald, BLR’s CEO, spoke about the relationship between sales and marketing and the tension that can be created. “[Marketing is] generating [the leads] and you’re not closing them,” he said. “Managing both and trying to find the optimal point between the two” is the key. Is that healthy, he was asked. “It’s conflict, but it is healthy.”
In the same session, Bobby Edgil, BLR’s sales director, took the leap to customer service. He is in favor of putting customer service and sales side by side. “Make sure the managers get along and communicate,” he said. If a customer calls with a problem after buying, Edgil wants them tended to. Tell them, “We want to put you in touch with a specialist in customer service.”
This apparently rings true for J.D. Power’s Anderson as well. “Many companies are still organized around servicing on one side and marketing on the other,” she told Marketing Daily. The advice would then be to figure out what your customers are using social media for—information updates, friendly interaction, customer service, discounts, community engagement, etc.—and then address those uses head on. “It’s kind of a failure to understand why consumers are reaching out,” Anderson says.
Bringing that back around, it’s good to venture out in new directions and okay to make mistakes—but perhaps more so on the smoothing-technology-out end. The failure that Anderson is talking about has a good chance of being prevented by communicating both inside your company and outside to your audience.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @RonnatSIPA