“For a period of time, Jeff Bezos was a heavy investor in marketing, but after a while he retrenched. “About three years ago we stopped doing television advertising. We did a 15-month-long test of TV advertising. And it worked, but not as much as the kind of price elasticity we knew we could get from taking those ad dollars and giving them back to consumers,” said Bezos. “More and more money will go into making a great customer experience, and less will go into shouting about the service. Word of mouth is becoming more powerful. If you offer a great service, people find out.”
Arie Goldshlager in an article entitled “Is customer churn a social phenomenon?“”
There’s been a bit about customer service here on PAOSS lately hasn’t there?
Customer service is almost a cliché but it’s more than a buzzword. It’s a whole new paradigm shift brought about by other upstream factors. So many industries are breaking down from mass market into smaller niches, including entertainment (think only a few broadcast TV channels to payTV to video-on-demand to YouTube’s watch any of a billion channels). The Internet and social media is facilitating these niches and a principle of the Marketing of One (ie everyone represents their own niche). Following the entertainment trend has been advertising moving from broadcast TV to a greater focus on targeted online messaging.
Jeff Bezos has made a groundbreaking business from watching what has been moving the needle. He understood early that mass-market advertising wasn’t the most effective way of marketing to the niche of one – word-of-mouth was. Word of mouth tends to follow great customer experiences.
The world of telco has invested heavily in customer experience initiatives, but just imagine if they diverted all their mass-marketing spend into customer experience initiatives. What would their NPS scores look like then? What would their OSS and BSS look like as the tools that shift the needle of customer experience? More specifically, what would the cross-platform journey measurement and management look like when it tracks each customers’ real experience (whilst paying careful attention to privacy constraints of course)?