Ever wished you could get your marketing department on the call center’s side? Here’s a short story you can share with them about the importance of customer service when it comes to marketing.
Forrester’s Josh Bernoff recently wrote an article in the American Marketing Association’s magazine, Marketing News. The article is called “Customer Service is Marketing” and Josh discusses a social media blunder by Maytag. Heather Armstrong, a popular mom blogger with a readership of about 350,000 and over a million Twitter followers, tweeted about a bad experience with Maytag customer service and a Maytag backlash began.
Josh goes on to give stats such as “people generate approximately 500 billion online impressions on one another about products and services every year” and “Nielsen Online estimates the total number of online advertising impressions in a 12-month period at a hair under 2 trillion.” Why does this matter to marketing and customer service? Because 25% of impressions about companies generated online are from regular people and not the marketing industry. This means that if a potential customer sees four comments about your company, at least one of them is probably from one of your customers.
So when you need marketing on your side, remind them that your call center is working to create positive experiences with customers and the customer service provided in the call center has the power to make or break branding and marketing initiatives, especially in the world of social media. And as Josh points out, customers believe other customers much more than they believe marketing messages.
 Camille is a Marketing Communications Specialist at Inova and graduated from the University of South Florida in Tampa. She loves watching USF football, spending time with friends and family, and walking her dog, Lexi. You can contact Camille at camille@insideinova.com.
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