Great marketers know that every consumer touchpoint is too valuable to outsource to chatbots or low-cost overseas call-centres. In a rush for efficiency, many companies have forgotten a foundational truth of marketing: every single touchpoint with your customer is an opportunity — not an obligation to be offloaded. Whether it’s a website chat, a follow-up email, a service call, or even an order confirmation screen, these are the moments when your brand either builds a relationship or begins to lose one.
Too many businesses — particularly those obsessed with cost-cutting, driving leads via funnels and over-using automation — are handing these moments over to generative chatbots, templated auto-replies, or overseas call centres with little context and often poor English proficiency. This is lazy marketing. Worse, it’s disrespectful to your customers and damaging to your brand.
Let’s unpack why this approach is not just ineffective — it’s unacceptable for any business who wants to be around for more than the next few quarters.
Every Touchpoint Matters
A touchpoint is not background noise. Every single one helps shape perceptions and influences your customer or prospect. What you do with consumer touchpoint = your brand, delivered in important moments. If marketing is about building, creating and nurturing relationships, then every interaction must express your respect for your audience, your values, tone, reliability, and customer focus – in short, your brand. Every time the consumer sees or hears your brand, it should enhance the relationship.
We think of it as: each brand owns a brand piggy bank. Any time you have an opportunity to touch a prospect or customer, you are putting a brand chip into the bank or you are taking one out. Based on your current practices is your brand rich or heading for bankruptcy?
You don’t get to say you’re “premium” or “customer-first” in your branding and then delegate the actual customer conversations to tools and teams that don’t speak the customer’s language — figuratively or literally. Most consumers cannot hear what you are saying because your actions are too loud! You are judged on what you DO not what you say.
Inconsistent tone, clumsy grammar, or robotic replies break trust. And trust, once fractured, is difficult and expensive to earn back. The message you send your consumer is “I don’t care about you, I care about saving money” and for the most part, consumers are indeed getting the message.
Stop Saving Money on Marketing
Yes, overseas call centres are cheaper. Yes, AI chatbots can reduce support loads. But the real cost shows up in lower customer retention, reduced lifetime value, and damage to brand reputation.
Warren Buffett, when speaking to his Berkshire Hathaway leadership staff said “You can lose our money, I’ll understand. Lose our reputation? I’ll never forgive you.”
I’m not promoting wasting marketing investments, but once a dollar is allocated to marketing, saving a few cents by cutting corners makes no sense. Taking care of your prospects and customers should be #1 on that priority list. Remember, a support interaction that makes a customer feel like a number, ignored or misunderstood doesn’t just risk that sale — it risks every future sale and every referral.
Think of it this way:..