Some age-old questions are actually quite easy to answer. For example, what is the meaning of life? Duh, beer! What is the universe made of? Easy, it’s a 40/60 blend of polyester and lycra. Other questions however have proven more elusive. For example, it seems like nearly every other month we stumble across some blog post posing the unsolvable riddle, “Who owns the customer”?
In the past, it was typically assumed that within any organization the Sales department owned the customer, and the role of the Marketing and Customer Service departments was to support Sales – albeit from a safe distance. “Sure, we want your help, but keep your grubby little hands off our customers, or we’ll break your fingers. Don’t talk to our customers. For that matter, don’t even look at our customers.” And in many organizations it’s still the case. Sales is king, and they own the customer.
Some organizations however have adopted a more loosey-goosey paradigm where no one in particular is directly responsible (or accountable) for managing the complete customer relationship. Marketing does whatever they think will drive the most brand awareness, without bothering to consult with Sales or inform Customer Service. Sales goes off and does their own I’m-such-a-lone-wolf-rock-star-diva thing, ignoring the work cranked out by the folks in Marketing. And poor Customer Service sits around in the call center nervously waiting for all hell to break loose. Which invariably happens.
Can’t there be some kind of happy medium somewhere in between the Sales-dictatorship and the hippie-commune approaches to customer relationship management? Who (or perhaps what) within an organization should actually own the customer? If you ask me, I would say that we’re still asking the wrong question. Nobody actually owns the customer. Unless we are talking about video games like Counter Strike where the terms “own” and “personally own (pwn)” are used to indicate a skillful advantage over someone – you don’t actually own people. Just to be clear, you might own a helicopter, a 200 foot yacht, a private Greek island, and a dozen award-winning best-in-show labradoodles. But you don’t own your customer. So stop thinking of your customer like some possession. Your customer is not a Gucci bag, a Porsche, or a set of Homma Five Stars golf clubs. Get over it.
Perhaps a more semantically correct question might be to ask “who owns the customer relationship?”. Now we’re starting to get somewhere. But even if we change the question to focus on ownership of the customer relationship, rather than ownership of the actual customer, I still take umbrage with the nature of the question itself. Semantics and predicate modifiers aside, we’re still focused on the wrong thing. It’s not about owning. It’s not about one group within the company saying this is my shiny customer, don’t touch it. It’s not about silos, walled gardens, gated communities, locked cupboards, or whatever other metaphor you prefer. Rather it’s about collaboration. Or at least that’s what it should be about.
The question that each department (and each individual) within the company should be asking is, how can my department work together with the rest of the organization to make our customers happier and more successful? What can I contribute? And how do my efforts align with the efforts of the rest of the organizations to deliver a consistent, holistic, end-to-end customer experience? For example, when Marketing decides to create a new promotion or campaign they should consult and align with the Sales organization to make sure that the marketing efforts will actually help the Sales organization achieve their current sales objectives. Similarly, Marketing needs to inform the Customer Service department of any upcoming promotions or campaigns so that the call center and social media customer service teams can get ramped up, educated, and prepared for increased customer inquiries.
And while it’s great to have all departments communicating with each other and fully aligned, there also needs to be a specific person or team who is ultimately responsible (and accountable) for ensuring that things runs smoothly – and perhaps more importantly, that the customer has a positive end-to-end customer experience. It’s probably obvious, but worth calling out: the goal is not just to provide a consistent customer experience across department and communication channels (which is important of course) but to ensure that the consistent customer experience is a positive one! After all, positive experiences results in happy customers. And happy customers buy more stuff (and refer friends).
This blog post originally appeared on TheSocialCustomer.com.
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