Urgently required: a department of the customer

Published on the 07/07/2015 | Written by Gerry McGovern


Focused on sales and marketing, most companies don’t advocate for their customers, argues customer experience expert Gerry McGovern. He makes the case for a department of the customer…

Consider most organisations: there is a department of selling to the customer; a department of marketing to the customer; a department of communicating at the customer; there is even a department of dealing with customer complaints – but there is no department OF the customer. None of the other departments really care about the customer. None of them see it as their job to keep the best interests of the customer in mind. Not one is the champion and defender of the customer when marketing or sales says ‘we need to publish this ad banner’, or ‘we need to force them to sign up to this content’, or when someone in pricing wants to milk loyal customers by increasing the prices they pay.

In most organisations there is simply no department that is there just for the customers. All the departments are lined up to sell something to or get something from the customer. Support is only there for those customers who are really in trouble. I’ve been in so many meetings over the years where the voice of the customer (or the voice of the employee, for that matter) is rarely, if ever, heard. There might be one or two isolated voices, but they’re not listened to and instead are often seen as troublemakers.

I remember once sitting in on a presentation where a group of marketers were presenting new product ideas and programmes. Almost in unison, they said to the web manager: “And we’ll be coming to you to get a banner on the homepage.”

Said homepage was a cluttered mess and most of the web manager’s week was spent fighting off requests for banners and other marketing and management ego content.

This website had a carousel for its banners. The web manager readily admitted that it was useless, that in fact it was counterproductive. But he said the reason it stayed was to keep marketing and management egos at bay. “They like interactive things,” he said. “Things that move and are flashy and dominate the page; and you can essentially deal with five ego requests in the one space.”

“[If] you’re just an entry-level position,” a customer service representative who worked for a home security company recently stated. “You just do what you’re told.” Does it make sense that the employees who interact directly with customers have so little value to the organisation?

More than 70 percent of salespeople, responding to a Dreamforce 2014 Conference survey, said their companies have lost a customer or sale due to poor performance or reputation related to customer support.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal in February 2015, 74 percent of executives state their top 2015 priority is improving customer experience. Yet, Forrester Research has found that “only 25 percent of customer experience (CX) professionals say their company’s CX programmes actually improve customer experience”. We need a radical rethink. The old organisational structures are simply not fit for this Age of the Customer. We need a Department of the Customer that has real power to champion the needs of the customer, to fight for their rights.

These are exciting times. Yes, they’re challenging, but there aren’t too many periods when the nature and structure of the organisation is forced to change. And this is one of those periods.

Gerry_McGovernABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//

Gerry McGovern is founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, which has developed tools and methods to help large organisations identify and optimise their customers’ top online tasks. He has written five books on how the web has facilitated the rise of customer power.

Post a comment or question...

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Other Articles by Gerry McGovern

Understanding social top tasks: what Cisco learnt

opinion-article |June 18, 2018 | Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern shares the story of an exercise he did with Cisco on why people used their social media pages across a number of platforms…


Collapse of trust and digital transformation

opinion-article |November 15, 2016 | Gerry McGovern

Globally we are facing a collapse of trust – and it is being driven by digitisation, writes Gerry McGovern…


Ashley Madison and the power of traditional marketing

opinion-article |August 31, 2015 | Gerry McGovern

Ashley Madison had a ‘lack of women’ problem long before it had a stolen data problem. It solved its ‘woman’ problem by using traditional marketing techniques…


Things we can still learn from the electrical revolution

opinion-article |April 7, 2015 | Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern invites you to reimagine your business in the digital age by taking a walk down memory lane…


Why customer convenience trumps experience

opinion-article |December 3, 2014 | Gerry McGovern

Usability expert Gerry McGovern says we should focus our online efforts on customer convenience and effort, not experience or satisfaction…


Interruptions at work

Busy people need help, not interruptions

opinion-article |November 20, 2014 | Gerry McGovern

Getting attention is getting harder. The web is a place where busy people do things. Help them, don’t disrupt them, says expert Gerry McGovern…


Why content is both the solution & problem in self-service design

opinion-article |September 16, 2014 | Gerry McGovern

Quality content plays a critical role in self-service design. Often a small change in a link, heading or sentence, can lead to dramatically higher task completion says subject matter expert Gerry McGovern…


cloud and mobile

How ease-of-use is reshaping the IT industry

opinion-article |May 15, 2014 | Gerry McGovern

The interface is increasingly becoming the product when it comes to IT. Ease-of-use, long a peripheral issue, has now become central says customer-centric technology expert Gerry McGovern…


Getting rid of website bloat

opinion-article |April 11, 2014 | Gerry McGovern

Customer engagement specialist Gerry McGovern explains why the traditional distributed model of website management was a failure and what you should do instead…


People think ‘products’ when trying to solve problems online

opinion-article |February 25, 2014 | Gerry McGovern

Many customers think first about the product they have; even when they are looking for support for that product. Organisations can use this to their advantage when designing user-friendly websites, says Gerry McGovern…


Processing...
Thank you! Your subscription has been confirmed. You'll hear from us soon.
Follow iStart to keep up to date with the latest news and views...
ErrorHere