When You Need a Customer Communication Strategy

Do you have full control of your customer communication strategy? Do you have one?

By Pat McGrew, Kodak

Now that we all know when TransPromo might be a good idea and when it might not be, let’s go up stream a bit. Before you can even get to the point of determining if a TransPromo approach might work for your organization, this would be a good time to determine if you have an up-to-date customer communication strategy that lets you take advantage of it.

Start with the obvious. Does your organization have a written customer communication strategy? Not sure? Ask around, and don’t be too surprised if you discover that you don’t have one. There are often strategies of all types in place, but a pure customer communication strategy is often missing.

There are many reasons. Start with history. Marketing used to be handled by a dedicated team of people who were most concerned with outbound marketing activities. It was all about getting new customers and a bit about customer care. As more channels evolved, codifying the strategies needed to guide the best use of each channel often took a back seat to getting actionable marketing plans in place.

That works for awhile, but over time messages to the market and existing customers tend to diverge without a codified strategy in place. For many companies, this is the current state of affairs and it’s a hard one to overcome. Retrofitting a strategy and then making it the guiding force for future marketing activities is a bit like trying to get the genie back into the bottle. But, to make the most of every marketing allocation it needs to be done.

And, as in many things, we can take a Crawl, Walk, Run approach.

Crawl
What is the current marketing guideline? Is there a written strategy? How do you know what the customer-facing messaging should be?

Start by outlining what you know about what guides customer messaging. Identify the organizations and departments that have touch points to outbound customer messaging, including as many stakeholders as you can identify.

Walk
At this point you should have a good view of your environment. Some of you will find that there actually is a reliable set of touch points and there is conversation across the marketing teams that will create a natural foundation for a codified customer communication strategy.

Sadly, many of you will not be so lucky. You may find that no two groups speak to each other and the customer messaging is chaotic. I may be receiving mail from quite a few of you judging by my own mail box. For you, it will take more work to build up a way to get all of the parties to the table. We’ll talk more about that next month.

Run
It’s time to build the strategy. You’ll need the foundation and agreement on the marketing goals. You might set them by product, product family or for the brand as a whole. However you do it, the goal is to get it in writing, circulate it among the stakeholders, and get them to sign on publicly to the strategy.

What’s the next trick? Getting everyone to stick to it! We’ll explore more ideas on how to make a customer communication strategy work in coming months.

Pat McGrew, EDP, is the Data-driven Communication Evangelist at Kodak. Her email address is Pat.McGrew@kodak.com, Follow her on Twitter @PatMcGrew or view her blog at http://patmcgrew.growyourbiz.kodak.com.