Go on Marketeers - open the door - I dare you!

It can be slightly intimidating walking along a calling floor. Teams of people in their own zone with their head-sets on and their face fixed towards their screens.

The reality is that your customers with their real emotions and their thoughts on your brand/service are also in that very room. Moreover, they are voicing their opinions loudly and clearly!

Having worked with so many marketing teams at the UK’s top brands it never fails to amaze me how many people admit that they have NEVER made a test call to their service and worst still have NOT spent time listening to calls.

Lazy. Unappreciative. Naïve. Overloaded. Resistant. Discrediting. Worried. Overwhelmed

I don’t want to get into a fight (although I’m from Newport in South Wales so chances are I’d win) but these are some of the real reasons I have surmised that the marketing teams don’t spend time listening to calls.

The data and sentiment that come out of the contact centre is richer than a sticky toffee pudding.

Dashboards and deep dive analysis are great tools to support your understanding of the customer journey. And, because most marketing departments remain custodians of the social engagement (I really don’t understand this but that’s for another blog) they feel this view is sufficient.

It’s not sufficient. You can’t take one channel and expect it to be fully representative of the customer experience. Similarly, if the voice channel is part of your omnichannel mix then you won’t be getting a holistic view of the customer journey if you don’t listen to calls.

So here is my challenge - If you are in a marketing team, you have a phone number as one of your calls to action and you haven’t listened to calls – then before Christmas commit to spending half an hour in the contact centre listening to calls.

With the amount of creative juices you have I anticipate you will come away with your brain going off like a firecracker considering ideas to improve the service, change the messaging, adapt the contact centre script or think of some wow moments that can be used to better engage.

It would be great to know how it goes……