Your hardest working marketing dollar is the warm body closest to the consumer

Customer service isn’t the sexiest, shiniest or most techno edgy option in today’s entertainment marketing toolbox.  But it is the hardest working most impactful marketing spend.  

Customer Service Is:

• Personal – and best served with real live human being
• An opportunity to put a face to and create a strong connection to a brand
• Profitable and sustainable

To the entertainment business customer service is an opportunity to reduce churn and build loyal return customers.  And guess what? It actually correlates with profitability! According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI); “Customer satisfaction is a leading indicator of company financial performance.  Stocks of companies with high ACSI scores tend to do better than those of companies with low scores.”

It’s not likely a big surprise to learn that subscription television services (66) and newspapers (65) rank among the lowest (heck, even government services ranked higher!) in the latest ACSI surveys.  Ever tried contacting either?  Plan on several minutes of classic number pushing, sickening cheerful automated voices and overall unhelpfulness.

So it is an ongoing mystery to me why entertainment companies ignore the research, ignore their glaring customer service issues, and barricade themselves behind technology while calling it customer service.  I love technology.  But it doesn’t take the place of a warm body.

Claes Fornell, author of  “The Satisfied Customer” asserts per the ACSI review of his work that; “ global market forces are all pointing towards one inevitable truth: the cost of poor service will soon be borne by the companies that serve it—not the customers that receive it”.