B2B Marketers Need Cultural Immersion

Recently, I’ve been helping my client, Sykes, to create stories about the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes them so valuable to their customers. Sykes provides contact centers to Fortune 50 companies in Technology, Financial Services, Telecom and Healthcare sectors.

One of the things I find fascinating is the familiarization and cultural immersion training that they provide to orient customer service agents with the work they’ll be doing to serve the customers of companies in different countries, as well as industry nuances they’ll be expected to know.  In the process of doing all of this, they also do role playing, simulated scenarios and use a ton of data for quality assurance processes that feed continuous improvement initiatives.

I can’t help but draw a comparison to what B2B marketers should be doing to better understand their prospects and customers. And, when done well, that’s exactly what developing personas does; immerse marketers into the worlds of their buyers, customers, end users. Personas should help marketers to understand the current environment for the roles they address. If you can’t articulate a “day in the life” for a persona, you need to learn more about them.

As marketing becomes the creator and keeper of the stories that strategically align the buyer’s journey with the achievement of  business objectives we need to reach farther across the organization to help to ensure a seamless experience. This means immersing ourselves into learning what we can from other functions, as well as helping them adopt the right extensions of these stories for the role they play in the customer life cycle.

When is the last time you talked with customer service about your customers? It’s great to talk to salespeople, but customer service can provide an entirely different perspective. Interviewing customers is also critical, but remember that they’re in “interview mode” and talking about something that happened in the past which is different than allowing you to understand the relationship in the moment. And a bonus: the contact center has the data to back up what they know.

Here are a few things to think about in relation to adding customer service insights to marketing immersion training:

• Social Sentiment: If your contact center is providing digital care, they are also monitoring what’s being said online. Is what they hear the same things that you’re hearing? Given the channels of digital care in use, can you gain insight to channel preferences that could help validate your distribution planning? Is there a topic that customers are talking about that could be incorporated into your marketing programs that will improve relevance for your audience? Is there an issue that marketing content could address that will reduce the volume of calls to the contact center by clearing up confusion?
• Call Drivers and Root Cause: What are the reasons customers call in the most? Is the story you’re telling in conflict? Contact center operations spends a lot of time analyzing calls and using data to get to root cause to see if they can affect something at the beginning that will lower call volume and increase customer satisfaction. Is there learning to be had in that data to increase the value that your content provides? Perhaps not for buyers, but maybe for customers.
• Who calls: Are the people calling customer service the people on your radar? Do you have personas for them? Are you designing programs for them based on what they’re telling customer service is important to them? Do they play a role in purchase decisions, or only post purchase? What about the decision to renew or expand the use of your solutions and services?
• Training: What kind of immersion training are your customer service agents receiving? You may think that it’s all ESL training if your contact center is off-shore, but there’s much more to it than that. Is the jargon, terminology and nuance education something you know? Are there particular preferences that agents have learned about customers that have become part of the curriculum? With the need to develop conversational competence (a topic in my new book, Digital Relevance – self-less plug), there could be gold in the training that your customer service agents receive. Have you looked?

Think about the fact that customer service can often be the people who interact with your customers the most. But there’s also a flip side to this. Are the stories that agents are sharing with customers complimentary to the story that marketing is sharing? Is there alignment? The value of cultural immersion is not limited to marketing.

What do you know that could help customer service operations? And what do they know that can help you?