the marketing/operations disconnect
reassembling the broken pieces or
‘denial is not a river in Egypt’

Part 5 of 5

about this series Part 1: Overview of the marketing/operations disconnect Part 2: Prospect, we hardly knew ye Part 3: Customer service: “warm and fuzzy” or “take a number?” Part 4: Customers who’d rather be “outta here” Part 5: Reassembling the broken pieces

Editor’s Note: Earlier this year, COCO+CO. sought to discover why a marketing program at one company generated $100 million in new business, while a similar program at a substantially comparable firm was an abject failure. COCO+CO.’s “Beneficial Benchmarks” revealed startling disconnects between what certain businesses believe they offer and what end-users actually experience.

Your business is losing credibility, customers and money.

Yes, it is.

Since this series began, readers have voiced agreement that every business but theirs has debilitating disconnects between what marketing promises and what operations delivers. COCO+CO. has been challenged by readers to identify any such flaws at their organizations.

As Sherlock Holmes said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts.” Consider what occurred when trying to communicate with some of these businesses.

• A return call to one business owner revealed all messages were being inadvertently forwarded to a general voice mail box that had not been checked in weeks. When the messages were finally retrieved, many were from prospects responding to a recent advertising campaign.

• An inquiry of directory assistance to find one caller’s business telephone number found the organization is not listed (It turns out the number is published under the company’s virtually unknown corporate name).

• An e-mail reply to one challenger was returned as “spam.” The company’s Internet service provider recently tightened security so much that virtually all e-mail was being returned, including common customer inquiries.

• One letter received was carefully prepared on beautiful stationery – obviously designed to impress, but was crumpled in order to be squeezed into an obviously undersized envelope with the company’s former address scratched off it.

• A visit to one business’ Web site for information revealed no contact data whatsoever and no forms with which to send an inquiry. A receptionist later explained the owner was trying to discourage annoying calls from salespersons, but forgot customers and prospects might also need to contact the business.

• An attempt to drive to one business was thwarted by a huge ice barrier at the company’s entrance that obviously accumulated over the last month or so. Apparently no one noticed customers doing U-turns and leaving without conducting any transactions.

The above disconnects are mostly communications-related. What other issues are occurring within these businesses? COCO+CO. called one contractor to schedule a common repair. The call was answered courteously, but two months later without a repair, the contractor obviously lost track of the order. The owner, who has been quoted in the media as blaming the economy for his woes, apparently does not want to believe there may be other flaws in his operation.

Economic conditions are obviously less than ideal, but this is precisely the reason you should work harder, improve systems and deliver better service. There will be survivors when the downturn ends and perhaps your business should at least make an attempt to be one of them. Too many managers and employees assume they won’t be making sales and are inadvertently discouraging them.

An area restaurant, for example, convinced itself business inevitably would be down and moved to cut staff, close earlier, trim customer “extras” and preserve cash by ceasing to advertise its low-cost lunches. Not surprisingly, income is tanking while McDonald’s just posted huge profits in excess of Wall Street estimates. There are some products and offers that actually sell better during recessions. Tell the public about yours.

You expected this article to list steps you should take to fix marketing/operations disconnects at your business. Okay, here are four:

• Get out of denial. You have disconnects. Everyone does.

• Pretend you are a prospect. Call and e-mail your own company. Visit your Web site. Eavesdrop to learn how your salespeople conduct themselves in-person and on the telephone. Drive through your parking areas.

• Address the disconnects you find. Use commonsense.

• Repeat as often as necessary.

To learn more about COCO+CO.’s “Beneficial Benchmarks,” call (800) 374-4103 or (978) 374-1900. Submit your comments to creative@cocoboston.com.

‘handoff’ risks stymie companies

Remember the terms “Business Process Reengineering” and “Total Quality Management (TQM)?” Supporters in the 1990s exclaimed these new methods were not fads, but instead “new ways of life.”

Guess what? They were fads. However, one tenet of reengineering – the need to reduce handoffs continues to have merit. That is, the greater the number of handoffs between employees or between companies and vendors, the greater the costs in money, security and customer satisfaction.

“Eliminating handoffs means doing away with the errors, delays and rework that they engender. Bell Atlantic, forerunner of Verizon, for example, reduced the time it takes to install a high-speed digital service link from thirty days to three; in some instances it now takes only several hours. Moreover, because the new process generates fewer errors and misunderstandings, the company doesn’t need additional people to find and fix them,” authors Michael Hammer and James Champy wrote in their 1993 book, “Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.”

Its full ostentatious name aside, the reengineering concept had merits. While the book was a fantastic success, it wasn’t embraced by rank and file workers for several reasons. First, many of these business concepts were perverted into meaning something corporate heads could use to justify layoffs.

Second, it was hard to keep a straight face while leaders babbled about “radical redesign of a company’s processes, organization, and culture to achieve a quantum leap in performance.” It was the latest fancy sounding and hackneyed blah blah blah to reach corporate boardrooms and, worse, restrooms.

your values, culture and money at stake

Some real-life handoff examples may hit close to home. Let’s say you outsourced a particular function to a vendor who also outsourced to a vendor who further outsourced the job. Don’t scoff.  You probably already have a number of these arrangements. The vendor actually doing the work is so far removed from your company’s values and culture that mistakes and miscommunication are common. Not only are you paying for more corrections, you are paying each vendor’s markup. The task is time-consuming and costly. Should any one of these vendors fail, you are too far removed from the end product to salvage much.

Last October, for example, thousands of Web sites went down when AlphaRed of Houston, Texas, abruptly closed its doors and later filed for Chapter 7 liquidation. Most companies with affected Web sites didn’t even know they were hosted by AlphaRed since they were outsourced by their outsourced vendor.

You may not be aware how many steps away you are from your own systems, but it is a good idea to find out. With companies failing daily, your risks are too great. Add to this, what happens to your confidential records when a subcontractor you have been heretofore unaware of is disassembled in bankruptcy? Are your security, confidentiality and non-compete agreements even enforceable that far down the line? Consider this, AlphaRed went down in flames as it was being accused by law enforcement officials of distributing “scareware,” software that made Windows XP users falsely believe that their registry had become “damaged and corrupted.” What would your customers and prospects think of you if your site distributed the false scares?

For a free evaluation of your Web and marketing-related handoffs, call (800) 374-4103 or (978) 374-1900. Submit your comments to creative@cocoboston.com. .