Customer Service is Marketing

This is an ongoing refrain of mine: your customer service process is a marketing issue. Your web content, even the customer interaction portions - no, especially the customer interaction portions - are marketing issues. As a marketer you've got to pay attention to this.

I'm going to give you two examples of service failure that have a marketing impact.

The first comes from a newspaper web site. The paper is the Washington Post, one of the most respected papers in the United States. I read their site for two reasons: it's one of the best national news sources available, and as a former Washingtonian I have a certain sentimental attachment to it.

I subsribed to one of their email newsletters. Then I changed my email address. I kept getting email at the old address. I went to the web site to update my address.

Unfortunately, they had my new, current address and there was no login under my old address. So there was no way to change it. I wrote to them and explained what was going on. Here's the response I received:

Thank you for contacting washingtonpost.com. Your suggestions and comments help us make washingtonpost.com a better site. Although it is impossible to respond to every individual comment, we do read all of them and will forward your thoughts to the appropriate people at washingtonpost.com and The Washington Post newspaper. If you are looking for answers to a specific question, try our Help & Feedback page for answers at http://www.washingtonpost.com/help.

Here's the first problem with this response: I had used the Help & Feedback page. There was a form on it to report problems. It was not a generic feedback form (for which this response would have been appropriate); it was a form specifically to report problems. I got a response that suggested that my message had gone to the wrong place.

Here's the second problem: I never did get any response. The problem did get fixed; but no one ever bothered to tell me about it. I received that message on August 23, over a week ago.

My conclusion: it's unclear whether anyone at the paper's site is getting trouble reports, or what is happening. Now how likely am I to subscribe to any other newsletters of theirs? Since ad rates are based on readership numbers, that's lost revenue.

The second example is from Fedex Kinko's. Before being bought by Fedex, Kinko's had a very good system for pricing and ordering print jobs online. I was checking pricing for a client who it seemed might need a rush laser print of brochures.

There is no longer pricing on the web site. You can upload files to place an order, but you can't find out how much it will cost first. This makes the site far less useful. So I used their feedback form to tell them that this was very unhelpful to this potential customer.

They did respond, but it was a very bad response:

Because our pricing and services vary by location, we ask that you please contact your local Kinko's for price quotes and additional information. To find the closest Kinko's to

Thank you for writing you, please visit our website at ,www.kinkos.com and click on "Advanced Locator" on the right hand side of the page. The next page has a search function. You may also call our 24-hour Hotline at 1-800-2-KINKOS (800-254-6567) for location information.

Okay, a response with a sentence that just stops mid-stream is not too good. And basically Kinko's has downgraded their online services. How hard would it be to let users pick a store and check pricing? I can find out if an item is in stock at my local Best Buy or CompUSA using their web sites. But Kinko's can't provide a price?

Their competitors often can, so that's less business for Kinko's.

It's not enough to create a brand and tell consumers about it. You need to make sure you're delivering on the brand. That means you have to stick your nose into other areas of the business that touch customers and make sure things are working well.