Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 7. Access Channels
In this seventh of a ten part series of videos, CurtisBingham, Founder and Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council on location at IQPC's CMO Exchange in London, July 2011, discusses the need to create your organization's own access channels when embedding customer centricity.
Transcript for Curtis On…Customer Centricity as a Marketing Strategy: 7. Access Channels
Access channels: In business, we choose these based on the density of the target audience, right? In the employee world inside of our companies and in most companies, they don't exist. You have to create them. There are no good channels to communicate with all of your employees.
In marketing, if we would say that there is no way to access this customer, we might choose to ignore that customer segment. But in this case here, we have to create the channels and create the opportunities to reach them.
One chief customer officer came to me and said that she was using Salesforce Chatter. How many of you have heard of it? A lot of people have heard of it.
She opened the Salesforce Chatter utility to all employees (this was in a mid-market technology company) and she said that the results were phenomenal. People whom she never thought would enjoy understanding what was going on in the customers’ world were absolutely eating it up. They said, “I never knew somebody was using our technology that way. I never knew that somebody would have that kind of a problem.”
And so, by opening that up, she gave every employee a window into the sales process and the customer world.
There was a major airline manufacturer (and there are only two); one of them had a great idea in that, every week there was a sales meeting where every sales person talked about their strategy for working with this new or current account that was brought in; and they had to present what their prognosis was for the account, what the next steps were, and what some of the challenges and obstacles were.
This individual here, this chief customer officer, opened this meeting up to everybody. Anybody in the company could come in and participate in this meeting. First off, everybody thought it was crazy that they were sharing so much information. But, in the end, what happened was that this meeting grew from 10 to 15 people to 120 people. The employees absolutely loved going into this information.
We heard a little bit earlier from Aaron of Dell that our employees are starved for information about their customer. They're dying for it. They're clamoring for it. And if we can find ways of giving them this information, it motivates them to improve; and they can do far more than we might with our scope if we can get a whole slew of customer advocates through our organization.