I had a fascinating discussion with Dan Bennett, Senior Partner, Head of Behavioural Science at Ogilvy Consulting, the other day, where he introduced me to the idea of “channel snobbery.”
Bennett believes that “channel snobbery” can lead to a type of estrangement between marketing and sales departments and their colleagues in customer service and support. And as a result, it may be holding back many brands’ efforts to deliver a differentiated customer experience.
He believes that this happens for two main reasons:
The first is that in many larger organizations, marketing and sales teams are often not in the same location as their colleagues in customer service. In fact, they can often be in a different town or city, which Bennett puts down to, in many cases, the “unintended consequences of procurement decisions.”
The second reason is that many people in marketing and sales tend to misunderstand and undervalue the roles that their colleagues in customer service, support or the contact center play.
I would go further than Bennett here and suggest that as unpleasant as it might be to consider, many people in marketing and sales sometimes look down on their colleagues in customer service, support or the contact center.
Now, this may be about the nature of the work that they do. But, I would also suggest that given that sales and marketing professionals tend to get paid, on average, more than their contact center colleagues, another explanation is that they fall into the trap of believing that the value or quality of someone’s contribution is linked to how much they are paid.
It may also have something to do with how much exposure they have to their colleagues. Recent academic research that covered 12 different countries found that over the period 1990-20219, almost all countries experienced “a growing workplace isolation of top earners and a dramatically declining exposure of top earners to bottom earners.”
That being said, where Bennett and I do agree is that this estrangement between marketing, sales, and customer service is both a huge mistake and a missed opportunity, and we should, as Bennett says, learn to see contact centers as “the customer insights fountains of knowledge that they are” and also that they are “key to unlocking a wealth of in-depth, personalised consumer insights that brand managers and marketers would kill for.”
So, how to combat this snobbery?
Bennett suggests that the best organizations recognize this rift and mandate that everyone spend time regularly in customer support or, at the very least, spend time working within customer support when they initially join a new organization.
Others, like Australian insurance company IAG, conduct periodic initiatives where senior leaders call customers who had provided them with some very positive feedback in the previous 24 hours to say ‘Thank You” and to say that they were writing a ‘Thank You’ card to the consultant or agent that helped them and if there was any message that they would like to pass on to them. Those ‘Thank You’ cards are then hand-delivered by the senior leaders to the consultant or agent that served the customer. This initiative aims to connect senior leaders not only to customers on a more regular basis but also to their colleagues who are serving their customers and solving their problems on a daily basis.
Then, there are individual leaders like Maneesha Bhusal, who, when working at Jingdong Indonesia, as Director of Customer Experience & Marketplace Operations, regularly spent time sitting next to customer service agents listening to their calls or rode along with their delivery drivers so she could see a customer’s delivery all the way from the warehouse to the customer’s house. She did this because she believes that these types of activities drive empathy and insight into leadership because it collapses the distance between the head office and where the transaction or interaction is taking place.
Now, not many people or organizations will admit to being snobs or being affected by this idea of channel snobbery, as that implies that they may respect or value certain people more than they do others.
However, I think there is something in this idea of channel snobbery and that it exists because the reality, whether we like it or not, is that every one of us is a snob to some degree.
The question is, how much of a snob are you?
How honestly you answer the question and what you then do about it may make a big difference to your ability to deliver a better experience for both your customers and many of your people.