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as one to ensure unification of action and seamless delivery? The Case For Harmonization There exists a business case for the harmonization of the two departments with four key highlights to support decision making to speed up the marriage. To begin with, a marketer’s biggest trump card is creating content that will speak directly into the listening of customers and potential customers, and to have them curious about the brand enough to engage. Any marketing strategy worth its salt will most definitely have an inbuilt content definition, development, discussion, and dissemination plan in it. Creativity is fed from ideas; a steady stream of ideas that can then be converted into concepts and communication projects. Who better than those directly at the heartbeat of the customer journey to provide insights into what would ‘fly’ or otherwise? The golden rule of customer experience excellence is to Know Your Customer. Knowing one’s customer involves profiling them and understanding their orientation, aspirations, and challenges whether perceived or real, and the anticipated solutions. By walking in a customer’s shoes, the ability to think through what would make them tick and what would constitute a good idea for them comes alive. Marketers need to be present in the customer service department meetings, to understand the nature of the customers they want to speak to, in the same way that customer service professionals need to attend marketing meetings to represent the voice of the customer as marketing campaigns are being devised. Marketers and customer service 42 MAL 17/17 ISSUE ‘‘Marketers need to be present in the customer service department meetings, to unde