If What Your Customer Gets Is Less Than What He or She Perceived...

To help make certain you live up to your customers’ perceptions, develop customer communications that focus on your customers’ needs. Talk with your customer, rather than to your customer. Use communications to truly put the customer first. Virtually every company claims to put the customer first, or claims the customer is important. No doubt every reputable company making this type of claim sincerely believes it to be true and just as sincerely believes it is doing a good job of serving its customers.

Ironically, customers may have a totally different perception of how they have been treated. You could be losing customers while you think you’re giving them no possible reason for leaving. Regardless of your size, your type of business, or your customer base, you can put the customer in marketing communications. Any company can. But to do so, you have to overcome a number of challenges. First, make sure internal and external communications are integrated—that your employees know what promises you are making to your customers, and what those customers expect when they call or are called on.

Next, make use of one of your best sources of information about customer satisfaction and customer suggestions: your own employees. To accomplish this, you may have to eliminate the barriers that often prevent frontline knowledge from being communicated to marketing executives at the top.

That is, you’ll have to eliminate what is sometimes called the “Iceberg of Ignorance.” Any group of employees that deal directly with customers will be aware of 100% of the problems faced by those customers, but as one moves up towards the top layers of management, the awareness level decreases sharply. At the very top, it is said that the awareness rate drops to only 4%. So you must ensure that communication flows in both directions—from the top down and from the bottom up.

Sometimes a customer’s feeling of being disappointed or ignored begins with a poor salesman. However, the feeling is more likely to occur after a purchase. You may want to check and see whether this is true with your organization. What happens when a customer calls your service department, your accounting department, your customer service department, your shipping department, or any other department in your company? Does the feeling of being a valued customer become a bit tarnished? After a sale, does your customer feel more like a neglected orphan than—as you promised in your marketing communications—like a valued customer?

If he or she feels this way, does it matter to you? Do you constantly monitor the perceptions that customers have—and are developing every single day—about your company? Do your internal communications constantly reinforce to all levels of personnel in all departments this important message: that customers are valued?

And are you even making any identifiable promises to customers? Can customers find any strong claim in your marketing communications? Do you offer—and deliver—substance?

At Marcus we know that successful marketing communications is not a single ad, a news release or a promotion. It’s a well thought out and well executed marketing strategy. That’s what we do and we do it well. We’ve served a broad spectrum of industrial, manufacturing, high technology, financial and other business to business companies on a full service or project basis since 1978.

When we develop a comprehensive marketing communications plan for you, we look at your marketplace, your products and services and your approach to your markets. We want your marketing communications program to take advantage of every customer benefit you offer. And you will get results because the program we design for you puts your customers first.

If you believe marketing communications depend on a planned strategy perhaps Marcus is the right partner for you. Call Joyce Marcus today at 847-459-6600 x14 to arrange a brief presentation.

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