Press "Enter" to skip to content

Month: March 2007

Branding 101: The Tale of Two Contact Centers

For those of you who still don’t think that your customer’s interaction with your contact center is a more important reflection of your brand than everything your marketing department does in a whole year, please read this post. 
I present to you the following tale of two very different experiences with the contact centers of two competitive services which reinforced for me where real brand building occurs in the eyes of our customers. 

The story begins when a certain Internet marketing guy, let’s call him "Ike", wants to ensure that he registers all possible permutations of the URL for a new company that he is starting.  Now Ike has a friend whose company owns a domain registration business, let’s call him "Ben".  Ike wants to support Ben so he uses his company’s service to register his domain. 
Unfortunately while Ike is trying to complete the on line transaction through the website of Ben’s company, he encounters an error related to his credit card. 

Essentially the service won’t accept Ike’s credit card for some reason which makes no sense to Ike as he uses it all the time, but hey, things happen, right?  As a marketer though, Ike realizes the importance of this moment for this particular company.  You see, this is a problem that has occurred at this company’s virtual till, the most important problem for any company to solve.  You have a qualified customer ready and wanting to buy something from you and he can’t for some process reason.  Unfortunately, this opportunity is where this particular company goes off the rails.

Comments closed