Would you like to open an account with Bank Al Habib?
Here’s your path to purchase:
1 – physically visit an outlet
2 – fill out a physical form
3 – hand over your documents
4 – be informed that they’ll snail mail you some documents
5 – receive said documents after one week only to learn you need to physically take a letter to the visited branch and get you cheque book
6 – get another letter which you need to physically show at the branch the next week in order to get your debit or credit card
7 – physically ring the call center, wait in que for five to ten minutes in order to provide some information that will allow you to active your debit or credit card.
8 – wait for the call center to call you back to confirm whether said information provided is in fact valid
9 – gain access to your money.
By the way, after step 3, the bank has access to your money but you don’t.
Redundancies like these, which often to lead to customer drop off’s, are just a slice of the reasons companies are moving towards a consolidated approach towards to conversion cycles. This is why leading industry experts believe that the marketing, sales and customer support departments are all going to be non-existent in the rather near future – you’ll be left with one replacement for them all, and that is going to be your ‘customer experience’ department.
These are fundamentally different departments, but only when you look it from the company’s point of view. The moment you look at them from the customer’s point of view, don’t you feel cheated when you call a company’s IVR, and have to wait in a queue for an average of 15 mins?
Essentially the idea from company viewpoint is that they want to sell not essentially support – selling is more profitable than supporting right – one being a profit center the other being a cost center. Now think about this – is it easy to up-sell and cross-sell an existing customer by providing a solid customer experience when they call for support than to sign up a new customer?
When companies today look at these as three different departments – they lose on that opportunity where the customers are waiting in the queue to tell you their problem and in case you treat them well they are willing to buy more right on the spot. So the whole idea of having one department which both sells and supports in a vicious cycle will not only create a great customer experience but will in the end create raving fans for you as a brand.
Now this brings us to marketing – when you have raving fans who’ve been totally knocked down by your great sell & support experience cycle they would start telling the world about you and will position you so much more strongly than your marketing dept with millions of dollars can ever do. Thus the whole idea that your marketing hands off to sales which in turn relies on support (and reversal) should be in an awesome customer experience cycle that you simply beat out any competition that works on these 3 functions as separate departments.
