Service, the new …Marketing?

There’s buzz lately about service as the new sales. This makes sense. In a cost sensitive, competitive economy, you’ll retain customers with exceptional service and off-set some of the expense of that service through cross and up selling promotions.

Relevancy and tact are paramount to pulling this off. If a customer has contacted you in a frustrated state of mind, pushing them toward spending more will likely put the kibosh on any chance of doing business with them again.

But if you are able to make the offer relevant and timely, you’ve done your brand a triple favor by:

1. Off-setting the cost of the service transaction
2. Helping your customer meet their immediate needs
3. Increasing the propensity for future transactions while creating an unpaid brand ambassador

As easy as it is to justify an up-sell, I believe a brand’s reputation is more valuable. This brings me back to relevancy and tact. If your up-sell strategy is to throw offers out there and see what sticks, you may make your call center metrics look better, but you’re setting the rest of the organization up to fail.

I guarantee that tacked-on offers irritate more customers than they convert. If you think the worst that can happen is they say no, think again. They can say yes…to your competition.

I just purchased an appliance I normally would have paid cash for but I was offered 0% financing. I like free money, so I took the offer. A week later, I got the first call thanking me for my business and asking if I need to borrow more money.

“Nope, I’m all set.”

“How about to pay off other bills?”

“No.”

“How about to buy a new car or take a vacation?”

Lady, you just mispronounced my name. You don’t know me. You want to give me travel advice? Where do you think I should go? Let me guess, someplace expensive?

OK, they tried and failed. But a few weeks later, I got another call, and then another. I terminated that relationship and will go out of my way to never do business with that lender again.

Here’s another example, I bought a digital camera from butterflyphoto.com as a Christmas gift. I was new to the digital camera world and didn’t know what size memory card to add. I called customer service. They didn’t recommend the most expensive memory card; they asked how I thought the camera would be used and sold me the right one.

For a birthday present for someone else, guess who I bought another camera from? And then when it came time to buy myself a camera, I bought from them again. They could have gotten an extra $20 on the first transaction, instead, they got an additional two camera purchases.

As consumers, we are becoming more comfortable with the shift in the balance of power to our side of the equation, and in the process, we’re loosing our tolerance for poor service. In the age of the social web, your company’s reputation defines your brand. In fact, you might even say that reputation building is the new marketing.