CONTACT AUDIT
Application: Customer Service, Customer Experience, Communication
The Concept
Several marketing-related concepts (CEM, brand integrity, the customer journey, touch-points, and moments of truth – see entry under service quality) put great emphasis on a customer’s experience of a supplier’s offer and distribution methods; the effect of interactions with the firm on the opinion of buyers and repurchase intent. This little idea is a practical method to understand the quality of these interfaces (see Figure C.4).
Figure C.4: A representation of a contact audit
Marketers should list all the firm’s interfaces with its customers. These range from sales and customer service employees, through operational materials (like contracts, statements, or invoices) to attendance at events. This, alone, prompts them to think about the effect of some surprising items. For instance, customers, who visit a scruffy office, are kept waiting by reception staff, or who have to negotiate difficult security staff, can have their confidence in the firm’s offer undermined, even if some of these people are clearly employed by contractors.
The tool then causes the firm to think about the frequency with which customers use a particular interface and the reason why. If it is very important or emotionally distressing to them, then the impression it forms is likely to be very influential. If the supplier neglects it, then issues are likely to arise which will affect representation and repurchase rates. Finally, the quality that customers experience and the outcomes they receive are considered. These are best completed in discussion with a sample of them.
This simple tool is a planning mechanism which identifies improvement areas in the firm’s interface with its customers. It emphasizes all aspects of the customers’ contact with the firm and prompts marketers to think beyond their own functional area.
History, Context, Criticism, and Development
Methods to test and examine the experience that customers have of a business and its products have appeared under many guises. It is as though the contact audit has disguised itself in various different names and functional specialties in order to achieve the same effect: collecting data which will improve the interfaces of the whole organization with its customers. For instance:
(i) “moments of truth” (see service quality). This was a method made famous by Jan Carsson of SAS in the 1980s to audit and examine the critical interfaces between customers and an organization. It is well known today as a practical quality technique and can be used by marketers as a method to engage other functions of their organization in analysis which will lead to improvements in customers’ experiences of the whole company.
(ii) “brand audit”. Brand consultancies and strategists now frequently use this method to understand how a company’s brand, particularly its corporate brand, affects people’s purchase decisions. Although this will involve research into communication issues and brand values, it frequently uncovers the experience of the brand in service encounters or operational processes.
(iii) the “customer journey” (see service quality entry). This term is commonly found in the financial services industry. It prompts executives to understand the process through which their customers move. It emphasizes the moments when potential buyers first hear of a company or its offers to the point where they disengage, even if that final disengagement is after years of repeat business.
(iv) CEM “touch points” (see service quality entry). Customer experience management is a very recent concept which links marketing, brand experience, and service quality together. Before the Western credit crunch and global recession it was gaining real traction as a powerful idea to improve customer responsiveness in line with marketing strategy. One important component of it was the need to identify and improve the “touch points” between a company and its customers. Slightly different to generic service quality concepts, like “moments of truth” (because it seeks to ensure that customer experiences are in line with brand positioning), it nevertheless seeks to audit the contact that an organization has with its buyers.
(v) communities of interest or stakeholder groups. Often used in PR or senior investor relations, this concept seeks to identify all groups who have an interest in a business and its objectives. Although it is often limited to developing communication strategies which address the concerns of these different groups, the data this exercise elicits can be used to construct more broad-based marketing strategies. Consumer groups might, for instance be one community of interest. Whereas, in the past, PR initiatives might have been used to communicate with them, modern marketers might be just as concerned with how they experience service issues, pricing, or even taxation compliance because of the power of the internet to create strong, negative viral campaigns.
Each of these approaches are similar, in that they set out to understand the full extent of the customers’ experiences of the firm; the way the brand is experienced by a company’s dealings with its customers.
Voices and Further Reading
- “Managing Brand Experience: The Market Contact Audit”, Chattopadhyay and Laborie 2005.
Things You Might Like to Consider
(i) Operational messages set up by others in the organization can undermine reputation and marketing messages. For example, many companies put messages on their call reception systems which are provided with the technology. Yet a customer that rings late at night and gets a message saying “we are experiencing unprecedented high call volumes at the moment” knows that this is not true. In fact, informed, valuable buyers are likely to know that any company which has been receiving telephone calls for any period of time has sufficient history to estimate volume and resource accordingly. What has actually happened is that the company has decided to keep the costs of call reception staff down by making customers wait longer for an answer; and they have chosen to lie to their customers about their decision. If marketers do not get a grip of this operational nonsense through a technique like a contact audit, the claims of their marketing campaigns will be undermined.
(ii) The performance and attitude of the people in a company, particularly a service company, can affect propensity to buy. This tool and mechanisms like the GAP model identify the relative importance of operational interfaces on purchase intent and revenue growth.
(iii) If a marketer knows the number of contacts between customers and their organization every day, they should be able to commission research which finds out how many are good and bad. From this they can calculate both the impact on reputation in numeric terms and the number of poor, or good, stories circulating about their firm. This rudimentary form of “net promoter” can indicate which interfaces ought to be improved when and how.
RATING: Practical