Customer Communication

In October, I am going to be presenting a seminar on Social Marketing & Social Media to a group of area marketing directors and business owners.

As I prepare for this presentation, I know that there are going to be new tools developed in the next few months and so what I might have said today, might be different from what I say this fall.

However, there is one common theme about what we call social media, and that it allows for two way communication.
Dialogue.
Conversation.
When social media is used properly, it can improve customer communication and perhaps fix problems like Pat Mcgraw talks about:

How do you talk with your customers?

I just got off the phone with a telemarketer trying to get me to upgrade my service with my cable and internet service provider to their telephone service.

And like I have done for the past 6 or 7 times I have been presented with this “special offer for valued customers”, I turned him down. Actually, I was a bit of a jerk – misplaced aggression, I know, but after the 3rd rejection I started asking to be removed from the call list. Obviously they don’t care about me.

Yesterday, I got yet another letter from my credit card company. I have one credit card from them – had it for at least 5 years. The only time I ever hear from them is when they send me my bill or an offer for another one of their credit cards.

Nothing in the package clearly explained if this card was better than my current card and to be honest there wasn’t anything in the package that clearly indicated that they knew I was one of their customers. And as I quickly skimmed through the package, I wondered how they would make money if I had an outstanding balance on my current card and decided to transfer it over to the new card so I could get 0% for the next couple of months.

How can companies, in this age of conversation, devise a contact strategy that seems to ignore the relationship that already exists between them and the recipient of the offer?

Does your company have a well thought out process for developing more profitable relationships with your customers? Have you thought about how you will upsell them to new products and services?

Or do you focus on new customer acquisition and forget about me? Do you forget to scrub your direct mail and email lists for current customers? Or worse yet, do you let your product managers focus on the product more than the customer so they compete with each other?

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