Service: The New Marketing?

17 May, 2010

By: Jeff Scurlock

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Service: The New Marketing?

There's buzz lately about service as the new sales. This makes sense. In a cost sensitive, competitive economy, you'll retain customers with exceptional service and offset some of the expense of that service through cross- and up-selling promotions.

Relevancy and tact are paramount to pulling this off. If a customer has contacted you in a frustrated state of mind, pushing them toward spending more will likely put the kibosh on any chance of doing business with them again.

But if you are able to make the offer relevant and timely, you’ve done your brand a triple favor by:

1. Offsetting the cost of the service transaction.
2. Helping your customer meet their immediate needs.
3. Increasing the propensity for future transactions while creating an unpaid brand ambassador.

As easy as it is to justify an up-sell, I believe a brand’s reputation is more valuable. This brings me back to relevancy and tact. If your up-sell strategy is to throw offers out there and see what sticks, you may make your call center metrics look better, but you’re setting the rest of the organization up to fail.

I guarantee that tacked-on offers irritate more customers than they convert. If you think the worst that can happen is they say no, think again. They can say yes -- to your competition.

As consumers, we are becoming more comfortable with the shift in the balance of power to our side of the equation, and in the process, we’re losing our tolerance for poor service. In the age of the social web, your company’s reputation defines your brand. In fact, you might even say that reputation building is the new marketing.