To optimize customer experience, get everyone to think like a marketer

When a customer interacts with a company, they aren’t generally conscious of which department they are interacting with.

The email in their inbox may come from marketing, the app on their phone may have been created by the company’s IT gurus, and the product or service they consume may be the work of some other group altogether.

To the customer, however, it all appears to come from one source – the company.

Of course, that’s not the case.

And any marketer knows how customer experience can suffer if the internal players creating the customer touchpoints aren’t aligned – if the branding is off, the app has bugs, or the product or service is not up to par.

Today, I want to argue that one of the best ways to keep customers happy is to have anyone involved in customer-facing interactions think like a marketer.

I’m not saying that the marketing department should be responsible for everything.

But I do believe that getting all customer-facing departments to think and act like marketers will help create a smooth customer experience.

Let me explain.

Marketing, at its most basic, is about promoting a company’s products or services. That means being attuned to what customers want and need; being aware of what the company has on offer (and at what price!); and working to connect customers to the product or service best suited to their needs.

Because of what they do, marketers are very interested in the customer experience. Happy customers are more likely to buy!

But people who aren’t customer-facing aren’t always finely attuned to customer needs, or equipped with the skills necessary to address them.

I once worked for a company that sent out a huge number of emails to its customers.

Those emails were getting coded and designed by developers who more or less acted on their own, and who didn’t pay close attention to things like branding or timing of mailings.

As a result, the customer experience as it related to those emails was totally disjointed.

The promotional emails that invited people to sign up for the product were very different in look, feel, and quality from those that invited people to create a password, for example.

That’s because they were produced by people who were highly skilled in technical matters but lacked expertise in such things as grammar or marketing know-how, or knowledge about what other departments were doing.

Speaking of what other departments do, another common problem is when emails get ahead of themselves because departments don’t coordinate their actions. One example of this is when, after a customer signs up for a service, the email about how to get the most out of their service lands in their inbox before the email explaining to them how to create their account and set their password.

So how do you overcome problems like these?

By getting all internal stakeholders aligned. To do that, you get them to think like marketers as it pertains to customer experience.

First, the company should create a best practices protocol for anything customer-facing.

The protocol should set guidelines for such things as branding, the timing of emails, and anything relating to customer experience.

It should be easy enough to create that protocol and have it accepted in companies with an open internal structure. It will be more difficult for companies where departments operate in silos. But it still needs to be done.

What those best practices are will vary from company to company.

Sometimes it makes sense for marketing to own the cadence of communications with customers so everything can be coordinated; in other companies, it’s less important.

But what is important is to have everyone using the same playbook.

Second, the company should involve marketing in the creation of customer-facing material.

For example, anyone designing an email on their own should run it by the marketing team before sending it out. The branding team should also vet (or design) anything going out.

That involvement, however, has to have limits.

There’s a tendency in some companies to drop everything relating to customer experience onto marketing.

We hear a lot of complaints from marketing operations people that everything is landing on them!

That puts them in an impossible situation.

That’s why the load has got to be shared.

Which brings up the third element on my list: Teach all internal stakeholders about marketing practices and principles.

It’s easier to get results if all internal stakeholders are sensitized to marketing needs and practices. That means giving people some pointers on the principles of marketing.

If a developer wants to write an email on their own, fine. But teach them how to do it in a way that aligns with the company’s brand and uses proper messaging.

That way, if marketing does have to vet something before it’s sent out, it’s already up to standard.

One final thing to note: Remember that in a large company, part of your audience is internal. It can be very beneficial to apply all of the above principles to internal communications; it will make information exchange smoother and messaging clearer.

And you don’t have to be as strict with internal communications. They generally don’t have to go through the central marketing team; your internal comms team can own the cadence of internal messaging.

The bottom line here?

It’s remembering that any interaction with the customer is part of the customer experience.

For a customer staying overnight in a hotel, for example, it’s not just about the room and the bed; it’s about the app they used to book the room and the email they got confirming their reservation and the concierge service they used to find a restaurant.

It pays to assess how each of those touchpoints affects the customer experience from a marketing perspective, and set up a standardized approach in which marketing has a say.

It will make the customer experience smoother and more pleasant – and marketing easier.