What do services marketing, services sales, and customer satisfaction have to do with each other? Quite a lot, if you do things right. Let’s start at the strategic level. Corporations today are expecting strategic contributions from services in several areas. Revenues and profits, of course, top many lists. Recently, we have seen some companies, such as IBM, using professional services to pull through product sales, reversing the usual sequence. Of huge importance, however, is customer satisfaction because that leads naturally to repeat business. Repeat business, in turn, leads to lower costs of sales, higher average sales prices, and hence, higher margins. This tends to affect both services and product revenue streams, increasing the overall financial health of the corporation. This admittedly short explanation is the business side of customer satisfaction and I urge you to use it internally in positioning services. Without a business case, customer satisfaction usually gets lip service but no resources.

Customer Satisfaction as a Strategic Goal
Based upon this business case, you should have a strategic goal to achieve at least a competitive level of customer satisfaction. I recommend using a top-caliber professional firm to develop a competitive benchmark for you. They have the advantage of working across the industry and can get you specific comparative data. If you try to do it yourself, there is a fairly good chance of comparing apples to kumquats.

Services Marketing’s Job
There is currently a mild trend for services marketing to take responsibility for customer satisfaction measurement programs, which is frequently outsourced. In addition to measuring customer satisfaction and communicating the results to the delivery organizations, services marketing is responsible for setting customer expectations, designing programs that will make customers happy (and operations can deliver), and helping the sales channels sell the right programs to the targeted customers. I don’t have the space to go into each activity in depth, so I will focus on designing programs that will make customers happy. This is a bit of the essence of marketing. It starts with market research to understand customers and the needs and expectations of however many segments you have. You should also add some competitive research to understand what your competitors are offering. Then you design your programs to meet the needs and expectations of your segments, being sure that your operations people can consistently deliver the services that you are offering.
     Setting customer expectations is a complex topic that I hope to address more deeply in a future column, but it starts with positioning—the comparison of one service against others, including your own and your competitors’. Marketing communications activities are used to set expectations via brochures, data sheets, presentations, Web site information, and all of the communication mechanism available, including what the salesperson tells the customer. Frequently forgotten is the reinforcement of the services actually delivered. This important step can dramatically help to manage expectations over time. Certainly, your major accounts, at least, deserve an annual account review to remind them of the good job you are doing as a services provider. This is increasingly important with more remote services and the growing use of e-Services.

The Sales Role
Salespeople have a tremendous impact on customer satisfaction by setting customer expectations, correctly or not, up front. It can take a long time to dig out of a hole that was dug by a salesperson before services ever became involved. A lot of mistakes originate with a salesperson’s lack of information or misunderstanding of services. This is a joint responsibility shared by services marketing and the sales channel. Marketing must provide information that is timely and easy to use. Sales must invest the time to understand it and use it skillfully. Sales also must believe in the value of service and communicate that value to the customer. In fact, in a study of top services sellers conducted by my company last year, we found that it was essential for services sellers to believe in the value of their services, and all of the top performers had that belief. When the salespeople have confidence in the service, they tend to sell it well and the customer expects to be satisfied. This is a great way to start. Unfortunately, the converse is also true. A salesperson who does not value service or has no confidence in the delivery staff is likely to get the relationship off to a poor start.
     So there you have it. Services sales and marketing both have important roles in customer satisfaction. While delivery is important, operations people need the help that can be provided by good marketing and good selling. Let’s try to operate as a team and we will all benefit, including the customer.

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