Personal marketing: the key to personal service

It is no use using the language of the past to talk about the business of marketing for the future. We have to recognise that marketing has to catch up with both the businesses it supports and the people whose behaviour it seeks to change.

First business. Shareholder return is more important than ever. The dotcom boom tried to suggest other drivers than shareholder return were the order of the day. Not so. What we have now is a keen eye on the prize, a legislative and infrastructure framework that makes life harder, and an increasingly sophisticated buyer. Add environmental matters to the mix and achieving the required shareholder return is that much more complex.

Next consumers: increasingly sophisticated, seeing through advertising, alive to marketing techniques, but always looking for the best quality at the best price. Cross them and you lose them for ever, treat them well and they can be your number one advocates.

In this world, marketing too has to come alive, to recognise that the old order is no more. It is not so much being alive to media fragmentation, technology, increasing numbers of networks, but alive to your customers as people. People who understand rational argument but live their lives emotionally, making choices that feel right rather than being obviously logical.

We hear much about brand marketing, online marketing and direct marketing as separate activities. At First Direct we argued for a holistic approach for each customer, which could be thought of as personal marketing.

Personal marketing looks at an individual in the context of their life, not your objectives as a business. It's your customers' choices and preferences that matter, not those of your business. What they want is what counts and it's your job to supply it. It's interesting how 'wants' have supported 'needs' in this new personal world. I was in Harvey Nichols in Leeds in the early summer when a lady came in saying rather loudly to everyone around, 'I must have more sunglasses'. Surely not. But the point is clear, sunglasses are what she wanted and she was to be the arbiter of which styles and brands she wanted to show off.

VALUE AND VALUES

So how do we make service personal and market it as such? Firstly by focusing on value: customer value. I am amazed at how many businesses still have a product focus rather than a customer one. You would have thought that CEOs had realised that a product-centred organisation is an organisation of the past. I recall a journalist saying to me a few years ago, 'You're lucky at First Direct, you have a customer database!' I was too polite to tell him that we designed it that way. To provide customer service you need to understand the value of each customer, hence you need a customer database.

The second 'must have' is a strong set of values that are in tune with those of your customers. Values that define your company's thinking and behaviours. When you treat your people well, they will treat each other well – and all of them will treat your customers well.

HAPPINESS, HUMANITY AND CONTROL

These are prerequisites. But what else do you need? You need to recognise what makes customers happy. There are two crucial ingredients to serving customers in today's world.

Firstly, control. It has seemed to me that it was self-evident that customers who trade with you online would prove to be more satisfied than those to whom you speak by telephone. Why? Because they have more control of the interaction, and time and again the degree of control is the primary arbiter of service perception. And so it has proved to be.

Telephones have for the last 20 years become the delivery mechanism of choice – not to serve customers but to cut costs. Except in a few notable cases, the telephone and its bête noire, the call centre have been found out. They do not offer the personal interaction of retail nor the control of online. They have had their day, as have organisations that seriously think remote call centres are efficient sales operations.

Interestingly, in this regard, the mobile phone might well prove to be in the ascendancy. It is both intensely personal and gives the user control of what messages are sent and received.

So what of retail? The drivers for the direct (telephone) revolution were in the first instance cost, but later a realisation that combining data with telephony was an attempt to replicate face-to-face capability. Over the past ten years the reduction in IT costs and the increase in the availability of data in distributed networks has made it quite feasible to furnish store or branch people with data. This has changed the situation significantly; telephone may have a cost advantage but loses out to the humanity of retail.

People like talking to people, and sales are much more likely to be made in retail environments by informed, trained people than by their counterparts in call centres.

If this argument holds, we shall see businesses building customer service systems for the online environment where customers self-serve.

Those very same systems will be used in retail outlets with agent assistance.

Call centres fall between two stools: they have neither the humanity of retail, nor the control of online. The logical extension is that we shall see call centres dispensed to local centres closely associated with a local store or branch.

PERSONALISATION VS PERSONAL

It is very interesting how so many people mistake personalisation for personal service. Using data capabilities to individualise messages does not necessarily improve the recipient's perception that he or she is being treated personally. We, as consumers, are increasingly sophisticated about marketing, and sceptical of marketing techniques. We know we are in a 'segment', if not why. We also know that the offer will change as the organisation tries to persuade us to buy.

Personalisation means just that, communicating with customers about what they want, not what you want to sell. Increasingly it will transform from the now defunct CRM to personal information management, where the consumer defines who has access to his or her data and for what purpose. But we have to realise that data is a facilitator; too often it seems to be an end in itself.

When we get personalisation right it adds enormous value to the customer experience and perception of service quality. Get it wrong and it is an invasion of privacy.

RECOMMENDATION NOT RETENTION

It is beyond doubt that the best way to engender customer value is to make the process of customers buying something as easy and seamless as possible. Loyalty in this regard is a quaint idea; it is experience that defines continuity. Equally, of course, the same applies to retention – the need is to focus on the buying experience.

Naturally, this is dependent on presenting the customer with a brand that they want to do business with. This means having the right value set, culture, propositions and environmental and social responsibility credentials. More to the point, brands need to be in tune with consumers' desire to be up to date and connected.

The end goal of customer service is not just more sales from existing customers and lower cost acquisition, but recommendation.

Recommendation is the lowest cost form of marketing; it is the ultimate in personal marketing. It will be self-sustaining and it will build over time if customers continue to have satisfactory experiences – joining, buying or being serviced.

MARKETERS NEED TO INNOVATE

To complete the journey through customer service, we need to consider innovation. There is an expectation from your customers that you will innovate. They need to know that what they are buying works, but also that it is leading edge. This is a matter of self-esteem in the eyes of friends and colleagues, as much as satisfaction about the experience/purchase decision.

The innovation requirement is continuous and crucial if the brand is to maintain its caché. Money spent on innovation in the long run is likely to generate better returns than increasing marketing investment.

The innovation process must also apply to marketing; doing the same tomorrow as you did yesterday will inevitably bring diminishing returns. Much better to think of marketing as part of the customer experience and a continually developing element of personal customer service.

Specifically marketers should think proposition rather than product. Product is too narrow a concept for the multi-channel world of today, where consumers can build their own product online at the point of purchase.

AND FINALLY ...

I am arguing here for marketers to accept that they are a significant part of the customer experience. The total experience is primarily driven by the value encapsulated in the brand and marketers enhance this by delivering it through joined-up multi-channel relationships.

We organise ourselves not by product or channel, but by customer need. This is personal marketing to drive personal service.

Fig 1: First Direct's attention to customer service was one of its founding principles.