CMOs sharing borders with service delivery teams: After-sales service matters

Author: Arun Pillai

It’s a digital revolution going on out there. Companies are finding themselves against the wall when it comes to understanding what the internet savvy customer wants. It is in times such as these that companies need to leverage on digital technologies and re-think on the after-sales or customer service strategy. This is where the aspect of sharing the borders with the service delivery team comes into play.

Unlike in the past, leaving the entire service aspect to the service delivery is no longer an option. With competition revving up their service levels and customer expectations soaring high, companies are left with no option but to rejig their after-sales service approach.

So, where does the CMO come into play in this scenario?

Interestingly, the CMO is perhaps the only C-Suite role that has the potential to actively collaborate with all the other C-Suite execs. This collaboration is on its way to becoming a reality as the role of the typical CMO gets extended towards after sales service.

Let’s understand why the CMO will have to share borders with the after-sales-service teams, going forward.

Collaboration is the way ahead

There is the traditional CMO, and then there is the CMO collaborator. While the former will continue to function as a marketer, the latter will share borders with the other functional teams to better understand customer expectations and align the brand (or company) to those expectations. Sharing border with the service delivery team will be one of the first things required of a typical CMO in order to better understand customer expectations.

An Accenture-Forrester Research report says that 76% of CMO collaborators surveyed are going as far as investing into technologies such as Artificial Intelligence to better understand customer behaviour patterns and deliver better service based on that.

Experience centric approach

A Forrester survey has stated that the role of the CMO is gradually moving away from ‘’Brand’ to ‘Customer Experience’’. While brand promotion will remain an important element of the CMO role, customer experience will be taking the front seat in more ways than imagined.

One might ask – Why an experience-centric approach? Because the battle is moving away from product (or service) to experience. Companies are coming out with products that are more or less similar in quality and customers are now looking beyond the ‘’quality’’ aspect of a product to the experience of purchasing, using and after-sales-service.

Enhancing customer perception

Good customer service will lead to great customer perception.

Perhaps, the most important reason why CMOs must align and share borders with the after-sales-service teams is because it is at this junction of sales and service that an organization will know if the brand (product or service) has indeed met the customer expectations. Whether the ‘’promise’’ actually translated into ‘’delivery.’’

The CMO would be the right person to really understand how after-sales-service impacts customer perception about the brand. Gathering valuable inputs, CMOs can come up with interesting insights on how the brand can be aligned with customer expectations and improve the overall customer perception of the brand for the better.

After-sales-service matters; it has gained much more attention than before. If a company wishes to know what its customers actually think, then it needs to talk to customers who have gone through the after-sales-service experience. And, CMOs with all their experience and vision of translating brand and communication to delivery and experience cannot be oblivious to the scenario here.

Next read: Why it is difficult to retain customers than to acquire new ones, and how CMOs can be involved.