Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Duckieyazi

Customers are the corner stone of the marketing process. And they are the reason why you go through the marketing process.... Starting from the research, the Ps.......etc

So YES customer service is a part of marketing because it is the method in which you respond to their needs during the marketing process.

EK

Organizationally, customer service generally "sits" in the sales department. One function they generally perform is an "inside sales" function - customers call in and the reps help the customer make selections and take orders. Another function is tele-sales - calling customers or prospects to solicit sales. Customer service also helps customers with order status. The reps field complaints and set up taking returns of product. These are all sales functions.

The customer service department also gather valuable data - like questions concerning products, input on competitive products and pricing, product return rates, etc. This data is very important to marketing efforts.

While Customer Service is a sales function, learning about marketing for a customer service career is valuable. The Customer Service group executes the marketing pricing strategy. The are part of the promotions efforts. They have to understand the product/service strategies. And they have to understand the product positioning. These are the classical marketing 4P's. Also, understanding the data that is important to gather and feed back to the marketing team is valuable for a customer service department. You can't go wrong taking coursework for marketing in pursuing a customer service career.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

customer service is the main point to get success,
so by getting customer loyalties we will now our market segment and start our market plane.

Dear Duckieyazi

Short answer is yes, it matters hugely and it matters as a vital part of the whole marketing enterprise. You can market, promote, attract position and sell as cleverly as your people are capable, but if the back engine room of customer service fails to maintain the customer experience through the trials and tribulations of use or ownership, just see what happens to your sales in the next few months.

For examples, look at NTL or Telewest until Sir Richard Branson got hold of them. Did he spend £billions on better advertising? No. he spent hundreds of millions and more appropriately, the strategies of the finest people in his organisation to sort out the dire customer service.

Then take CRM Packages these days. Speaking as a specialist, I can assure you that the majority of CRM software users do not use them for Customer Relationship Management. They use them for Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) (Quite badly) Sales Pipeline Planning (Forecasting) (Even more badly; apart from us!!!) Sales Activity Analysis (Usually anally)and lastly as an electronic junk box of a filing cabinet into you can fling your customer details, knowing full well that you can retrieve anything you’ve lost in it, because it’s a database. That is if you know what to search for.

So guess what? The best CRM packages now have Customer Service Capabilities, which are incredibly powerful, incredibly underused, underpowered, but rather hard to screw up.

Because they integrate with your address book, your electronic filing cabinet, your mailing list, your rubbishy “Sales Funnel” and your half hearted attempt to analyse what on earth the sales department has been getting up to, they are the one bit which kind of works.

Only no package sold by any manufacturer actually works out of the box, for any company that I have come across (That I have yet seen) so they need customising. But even when they “Kind of work”, boy are they appreciated.

I think that in conclusion to your question, you will be making a very sensible choice. There is a dearth of CS orientated marketing people who can work both with customer structures and with the software on the market.

You should do very well. Just as well as we are going to do with Sales Performance Management and Forecasting

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions and SalesVision

Picking up on a trend here,,,yes customer service is a huge part of marketing as mentioned above.

Good Luck & Look Before you Leap!

THANKS A LOT for all the advices and comments!! I am very encouraged!

Thanks again!