Stop me if you heard this: Service is the new Marketing, Marketing is the new Sales, Sales is -- well Sales.
I have been hearing this for quite some time now. Business has changed, you cannot do things like you used to anymore; the traditional model for doing business has changed; organizations are not what they used to be, and customers' behaviors changed so dramatically that you cannot expose them to the same old business functions anymore.
I agree with one part of that discussion -- the customer has changed, and your organization must adapt to it. The new Social Customer demands are more complex, more personalized. Customers today are in control of the relationship, and they are demanding a customer-centric organization on the other end. Customer-centric organizations don't have departmentalized business functions; they focus on end-to-end process. Those who are not there today will begin their shift towards this model in the next six-to-twelve months.
In an end-to-end process there is no room for functions performed by a specific business unit: it happens when the customer needs it. The repetitive organization-centric customer lifecycle of targeting-acquisition-sales-support is no longer valid. Customers may inquiry about Marketing content in the middle of a support interaction, or expect to enter a sales transaction without getting any information directly from the company. The standard functions that were once performed by Marketing are now performed by virtually anyone in the organization (hopefully with the proper tools to support them).
To complicate matters further, the customers are no longer single individuals that we target and acquire as part of a specific demographic: they are part of communities. Marketing as it was done before, specific information on products customized to a demographic or stage of the sales process, is no longer the norm. Organizations are now faced with the daunting task of moving away from the 1:1 (one-to-one) interaction model that they used for close to forever to a 1:M: 1 (one-to-many-to-one) model where the community is the recipient of the information and in turn will do the Marketing for the organization with the individual user. Users no longer listen to information produced by the Marketing department, they listen to what their peer groups and supporting communities tell them. Organizations must learn how to interact with communities, leveraging advocates and promoters, instead of try to impact individual users (even if the argument of Marketing to communities does not convince you, think of the economies of scales of using advocates to spread the word via word-of-mouth - yeah, I thought you'd see it that way).
Finally, there is the issue of the experience to consider. Until recently, experience management has been relegated to Service organizations, and this is where the motto of Service as the new Marketing began. Service departments, aided by their Marketing counterparts, tried to transform each interaction into a branding experiment. Of course, that model failed since customers are not looking to get marketed or have a brand thrown on them each time they interact with the organization.
Experiences must be reflective of the end-to-end processes put in place, but that has not been the case. They tend to be focused on one portion of the end-to-end experience only. That is changing, as we are seeing more and more organization backing away from the single experience imposed on customers and slowly moving into an end-to-end experience continuum model that is more effective at giving the customer what they want when they want.
So, is Service the new Marketing? Hardly
However, Service and Marketing functions are part of a Social Businesses that leverages them together in an effort to deliver unique experiences to communities and individuals. Instead of saying that Service is the new Marketing, or Marketing is the new sales, maybe we should be saying that social experiences are the new business.
Social Business is the new Business.
What do you think? Should we continue to focus on individual functions? Or is the end-to-end experience the new Marketing? Would love to read your thoughts...