The Customer Service Survey
Marketing to Marketing If You Can Find Them
Wed - November 1, 2006 05:45 PM in
Over the last weeks, we've written about a slight shift in our sales efforts based on the suggestion that since our studies gather reams of information about callers/customers that marketing would love access to; we should be presenting VocaLabs services to the marketing department as well as customer service.
Makes sense, and as I try and get my arms around a way to accomplish this end, I thought I'd share some observations.
* Far more companies seem to be turning to outside enterprises, call it "contracted marketing" than keeping senior marketing staff in house. I heard this in a recent speech by one such outsourcer over the difficulty of finding marketing decision makers within large organizations.
* I sensed the same when joining the American Marketing Association and finding much of the activity surrounding job networking and local association management being accomplished by twenty-something volunteers. Even seeing middle age folks at meetings is uncommon.
* The proliferation of PR firms, advertising firms, design firms and such, that are AMA members suggests that what used to be just marketing, now has a confusing number of niche specialties.
* In the entire customer service space where we have been focusing, there are perhaps 6-8 firms that offer any sort of caller satisfaction study service. But I just counted 314 firms that provide customer satisfaction test services who define themselves as Market Researchers. And the majority of those are clearly marketing enterprises as evidenced by nearly all of them promoting some "new and improved" service exclusive. (Hint: Sorry but there just aren't anywhere near 314 exclusive ways to ask customers questions. Many of these exclusive trademarked services appear more hype than substance. You can have a computer dial phone numbers and have those that answer take a survey. And you are free to call it Computer Assisted Telephone Interview Service (CATIS) and trade mark the name, but its still just a phone follow up survey.
These findings are telling me that as a service bureau, it is a better strategy to offer our services to these research firms, than to enter a very crowded field and compete against them.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
* Far more companies seem to be turning to outside enterprises, call it "contracted marketing" than keeping senior marketing staff in house. I heard this in a recent speech by one such outsourcer over the difficulty of finding marketing decision makers within large organizations.
* I sensed the same when joining the American Marketing Association and finding much of the activity surrounding job networking and local association management being accomplished by twenty-something volunteers. Even seeing middle age folks at meetings is uncommon.
* The proliferation of PR firms, advertising firms, design firms and such, that are AMA members suggests that what used to be just marketing, now has a confusing number of niche specialties.
* In the entire customer service space where we have been focusing, there are perhaps 6-8 firms that offer any sort of caller satisfaction study service. But I just counted 314 firms that provide customer satisfaction test services who define themselves as Market Researchers. And the majority of those are clearly marketing enterprises as evidenced by nearly all of them promoting some "new and improved" service exclusive. (Hint: Sorry but there just aren't anywhere near 314 exclusive ways to ask customers questions. Many of these exclusive trademarked services appear more hype than substance. You can have a computer dial phone numbers and have those that answer take a survey. And you are free to call it Computer Assisted Telephone Interview Service (CATIS) and trade mark the name, but its still just a phone follow up survey.
These findings are telling me that as a service bureau, it is a better strategy to offer our services to these research firms, than to enter a very crowded field and compete against them.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
Posted at 05:45 PM | | | | |