Good Marketing + Great Customer Service = Omni-channel Success

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In today’s world businesses no longer have the luxury of compartmentalizing the customer experience. Consumers have a multitude of ways to engage with a company: walking into a physical store; browsing a catalogue, visiting a website, or using social media. They also have multiple devices for accessing products or services, from desktops to smartphones. So it’s now up to brands to ensure that a consumer’s experience is seamless across all these channels (Omni-channel). However, that’s easier said than done, because many brands are not used to thinking in these new terms. Ensuring consistent, Omni-channel experience means that marketing and customer service go hand in hand. Or at least they should. In practice, there’s often a huge gulf between the two groups, if they interact at all. Too often, marketing opportunities are the carrot, and customer service “obligations” are the stick.

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Why Marketing is Best Suited to Manage Corporate Social Media

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Why is Marketing best suited to manage corporate social media activities?
At the core social media activities are a function of Marketing, just as PR, Communications and Customer Service should be. Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. IMHO, the CMO should oversee all marketing, PR, communications, customer service, and customer experience management. Every touch point with the consumer needs to come under her purview. Often this is not the case—customer service and communications/pr are often siloed. This is a big mistake in the new marketing/social world since the message needs to emanate from one source. True marketers understand that they must be the lead stewards for brand, reputation, communication, and customer relationships.

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Establishing Trust: a Crucial Pillar in Building Customer Experience

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Communication: We know that in order to build trust with another person there must be good, two-way communication. It’s central to our existence as human beings, yet we struggle with it every day. Multiply that struggle by the number of people in your organization, and you can begin to see just how essential communication is in building trust with your employees, vendors, partners and customers.

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Is the Brand Love Affair with Snapchat Sustainable?

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The buzz surrounding Snapchat for brands is definitely at a high decibel level. And just like other new social apps, there are lots of tutorials and how-to articles being created on a daily basis to show you how to get the most out of the platform. But what happens after the “shiny new toy” syndrome wears off? Is the millennial audience going to get disenchanted and be looking around for the next new thing? Perhaps not, if you play your cards right.

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Get it right: The Difference Between “Social Spend” and “Advertising Spend”

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Social spend—you can’t escape the term in the marketing world, but what does it really mean? Most of the articles and statistics you see on social spend are narrow in focus—it’s all about ad buys. From that perspective, social spend sets a new all-time high every year. In 2015, the estimated social ad spend checked in at nearly $24 billion, largely thanks to mobile advertising. This year, it will surely be even higher.

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