Service/Delivery Analytics: A Renewed Frontier?
There has been quite a lot of attention again put on marketing ROI (Return on Investment), ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) over the past year as companies and practitioners continue to look for ways to demonstrate the impact of their marketing efforts.
The entire space of marketing analytics has seen phenomenal growth over the past decade as more and more companies have sought to refine their marketing activities, especially direct marketing. Thanks to its nature, it is a relatively straightforward thing to apply rigorous testing and analysis to direct marketing efforts to demonstrate the lift and ROI on a particular marketing campaign. As a practitioner myself for the better part of 15 years now, I know that with even a little bit of data I can design and deploy a successful direct marketing initiative and clearly demonstrate an ROI (usually positive!) for a client and repeat that success over time to generate piles of money on their behalf.
However, I’ve recently begun to wonder whether we’ve pushed too far into a cycle of ever-refining our marketing efforts without thinking of the bigger picture in which we are doing it. This has been informed by a recent personal experience that I’ll share quickly to set the stage for the remaining comments:
My roof is missing shingles and part of the fascia on the front gable of our house. It has been for the better part of a month now. I’ve called 5-6 different suppliers to get quotes to fix the situation. Out of the 6, three have actually provided me a quote. One never called back, two (2) told me it would cost me money for them to receive the privilege of a quote.
Of the ones that provided a quote, one said they wouldn’t warranty their work. When I asked “why?” they said it was industry practice on repair work because they don’t want to be responsible in case the rest of the roof has a problem. I tried to explain that I wasn’t expecting them to warranty my whole roof, only the part they fixed in case it has trouble. No deal, so I eliminated them from the search.
I finally settled on the one company that provided a prompt quote and seems to have the experience to do what I needed. They have a great website you can visit to see the type of work they do, how long they’ve been in business, etc. The trouble is, I’ve been waiting for the better part of 3 weeks now for them to actually come and do the work. When I call them to find out why they haven’t come, I get a lot of excuses (the guy is sick; they tried but it was too cold or windy) but here I still don’t have a solution to my problem. The best part is, when I call and am put on hold, they have a lovely-voiced woman who soothes me with talk of how much this company values my business, and how their business is built on referrals and happy customers.
By now I hope you are getting some of the point to come. As a direct marketer and marketing consultant, I am quite confident I could go into this business and help them better target their efforts and make more money doing so, but if they can’t deliver on that business, am I really delivering them a benefit or am I just letting more people experience their terrible service, thereby destroying their long-term referral and growth potential? They have no doubt spent quite a bit of money on building their business and branding it via their website, however their service experience is in direct contradiction to what they promise.
This brings me back to my original point. Perhaps instead of focusing ever more finely on our marketing ROI, we need to step back and think harder about our abilities to deliver our products or services. I still see a lot of companies that are excellent at direct marketing put barriers between themselves and their customers, making what should be simple experiences complex because of “industry standards” or “policies”.
I’m not saying abandon ROI, because it is and should remain the benchmark of evaluation for marketing efforts. However, have you given any thought in the last little while to some of the following questions related to service delivery and fulfilling your promise to customers?
1. Do you know how many times an average customer has to call you to get their problem resolved?
2. Do you know how many of your calls are resolved in one shot vs. the service situations that require repeated call backs on your and the customer’s part?
3. Do you know how much money it costs you in dollars and cents to have to keep going back and forth with a customer to resolve a complaint or improperly fixed problem?
4. Do you have any measures of your service delivery success or failure in terms of how the customer experiences the situation?
5. What are your policies and procedures with respect to customer facing situations? Are they designed to make it easier for you or do they actually make it easier for your customer to deal with you?
When you look long and hard, some of the numbers can be staggering. With one of my previous employers, we went through the exercise of trying to calculate how much money we could save by refining the account opening process. By our estimate, it would have been about $180,000 -$250,000 per year and it would have shaved two days of customer time out of the process.
This type of effort garnered a lot of effort back in the heyday of CRM as companies were looking at automating various capabilities within their organization, but it seems to have waned in recent years, at least in my experience.
In closing, I still believe we do need to keep our focus on ROI and the benefits of our marketing efforts, but perhaps the time has come to target the guns at our service and fulfillment areas as well. It will benefit both companies and customers.
P.S. If you want a list of bad roofers, give me a call.
