​4 brand leaders building the bridge between marketing and customer service

Sumo Salad’s employee emphasis

Like Powershop, Sumo Salad has seen customer experience become the key to a healthier bottom line.

“Ultimately, organisations can operate and do their thing, but you must have a function looking at the whole picture of the experience a consumer has with the brand,” argues chief customer officer, Lawrence Mitchell.

“We are in an age of change, disruption and globalisation. As customers ourselves, we expect a lot, and I’m mindful of the research that says 76 per cent of customers expect organisations to understand their personal needs. That’s huge. What’s scary is there’s a massive misalignment between customer expectations and the ability of most organisations to delivery against that.”  

In Sumo Salad’s case, the answer was to bring marketing and customer experience functions, including service, into one unified force. Changes were made as the organisation extends out from its traditional retail business to include an FMCG arm selling ready meals via supermarkets, as well as builds out a direct-to-consumer offering.

As Mitchell is quick to point out, there’s physically and philosophically connecting what have previously been distinct work forces to the greater customer purpose of an organisation. Neglect one or the other at your peril.

“Traditionally, organisations are siloed, and it’s common to find one team doesn’t understand what the other does,” he says. “Customer service and marketing are good examples of that. Customer service agents are often in separate locations or a contact centre, and don’t have the context in terms of what other parts of the organisation are doing. Likewise, marketers see customer service as dealing with a particular touchpoint.

“There hasn’t necessarily been that closed loop of providing feedback.”  

To join the dots up, it’s vital you put the customer at the centre of the organisation. “Therefore, everything you do from a process point of view is designed to ensure the customer has a good experience of the brand, that brand is joined up internally,” Mitchell says.

Strategic thinking and time to understand what role different functions play in terms of different touchpoints is integral to this exercise, Mitchell says. Another must is concerted effort around communication, ensuring correct information is flowing through the organisation and gets to the frontline.

“Then it’s having insights and feedback from the frontline flowing backwards so marketing and product teams can take action based on those insights,” Mitchell says.  

Technology tools and processes support this quest. “You need technology to function, caption and share information, particularly as an organisation gets bigger,” he continues.

“At Sumo, we have a retail side, and a growing FMCG business selling ready meals via supermarkets. So the information coming in, and the needs, are different. On the restaurant side, customer service staff are the people selling in our shops. Connecting what they’re doing on a daily basis to headquarters requires technology tools to share that. It also requires operational changes to get HQ staff working in stores, experiencing what it’s like to speak to customers face-to-face. Otherwise there’s disconnect.”

But tools are only useful if you have also the shared philosophy of better serving customers. Which is why, alongside external customer experience, Sumo put heavy emphasis on improving employee experience.

“Not only do employees touch our customers, they create so much of the value customers can enjoy,” Mitchell says. “As a franchise business, we have multiple cultures, which is why we did the values piece to bring it together, and to help with recruitment, training and provide a more coherent culture.”

Putting the customer front and centre at Sumo was tackled in two ways. The first was strategic work on the 15-year old brand to articulate its purpose. “We started by saying what is the purpose of the brand, what are we trying to achieve and who are we trying to serve and who are our customers,” Mitchell explains.  

Work led to the clarified purpose, ‘human greatness’, as well as a set of values underpinning Sumo’s culture. What followed next was a customer segmentation project.

“We segmented based on traditional demographics, but also based on attitudes, particularly in relation to health and lifestyle,” Mitchell says. “It’s enabled us to develop a range of segments that not only help us develop better content and messaging, but also products that match specific needs of our audiences.

“That’s underpins the operational work around product development, providing recipe, packaging distribution partners, content creation, media partners and work.”  

Being able to understand, end-to-end, the different touchpoints a customer goes through with your brand and recognising not all are created equal is a great piece of work to do together, Mitchell says.

“Bring all people together for all different touchpoints – not just service and marketing but product, finance, technology and more. Doing it together allows them to understand things from the perspective of the customer,” he says. 

Along the way, and through the ups and downs of business transformation, Mitchell says his biggest lesson has been communication.

“We don’t always have all the answers, and when you’re going into new territory, everyone is doing new things and it creates stress. The more we can communicate, listen to people and understand the risks they see, the better actions we take,” he says. “And the more we communicate, the more people come on the journey and we get to a better place.

“Bringing together all our different views into a detailed range of insights makes us more confident in decisions we are taking, too.”  

Culture is another very important lesson, as is designing a value-based environment for people to grow and develop. “Thinking of employees as a customer segment helps balance the needs of external customers with internal employees,” Mitchell says.  

And customer segmentation work, which has just been updated at Sumo, was a third lesson. The brand’s work took insights from customer service that helped everyone better understand their position within the customer expectation wheel.

“For the services team, it puts their jobs more in context and when they listen to customers, helps us align them to different segments,” Mitchell says. “Having groups of people that understand the needs and wants of our customers allow us to deliver a better service. Likewise, we’re getting regular feedback from the frontline highlighting whether customers are happy or not. That helps evolve our recipes, our product quality. All this leads to consistency and gives customers a warmer feeling towards the brand.”  

The more Sumo understands customer problems, the more innovative solutions it can up with to solve these problems, leading to profitable business growth, Mitchell says. It’s even led to new strategic partnerships for Sumo Salad, such as with gyms and fitness organisations.

“Their solution is different to ours but the problem they’re trying to solve is the same. We’re combining for greater value for the customer, than either of us can do on our own,” Mitchell adds.  

Mercer’s customer agenda

The traditional view of customer service as an operational function is one Mercer chief customer officer, Cambell Holt, firmly believes needs to be discharged.

“Customer service is a fundamental element of the value a customer gets from interacting with an organisation,” he says. “Yet the important need to manage these functions and the impost they create on an organisation’s resources efficiently tends to influence management thinking ahead of the most important role these function play: To create and shape way customers experience a business.”  

Mercer’s realisation of the importance of experience-led business happened a number of years ago. The proliferation of digital has done two things to accelerate this for the financial services company Holt says: It’s commoditised core product; and it’s magnified the choices available to consumers.

“Adopting an experience-led mindset cemented our strategy around the importance of customer service channels, and their proximity to all other functions primarily accountable for creation and delivery of customer value,” he says.  

Mercer has invested substantial dollars in building out a customer data and management engine, improving its line-of-sight and responsiveness to customers. It also opted to create the chief customer officer role, which Holt now occupies, overseeing consumer marketing, customer experience, call centres, customer service channels, digital, insights and analytics, customer platforms and strategy.

The challenges of bringing these functions together are real in many areas, Holt says. One that has had to be overcome is traditional notions held in different parts of the organisation on the jobs they’re there to do.

“It runs to culture. Without calling out any specific functions, things like getting a marketing team to be fully appreciative of the realities of running a large group like running a call centre is challenging,” he says. “These challenges often manifest when different parts of the organisation seek to create change, with the best intent. How it’s received and operationalised in different customer service channels can be quite challenging. Or conversely, it’s getting the huge customer insights from a call centre and into the hands of marketing in real time.”

What’s binding Mercer’s marketing and customer service people together is very deep sense of purpose. Holt says much leadership bandwidth has been expended on embedding purpose with every colleague and ensuring all staff understand the driving corporate purpose is to better lives for customers.

“That can be a banner hung over the front door or something everyone in the organisation walks into work being energised by,” Holt comments. “It’s taken many years for us to be comfortable that the majority of staff come into work with that purpose in their DNA.  

“This shifts mindsets around what’s important in their day-to-day work. A key part is making sure every person, regardless of role or function, understands how what they’re doing every day contributes to value for customer and the way customers experience our business.”  

New technologies have been helpful, particularly in getting diverse functions to work together, and Holt points to Mercer’s CRM, marketing automation platforms and customer journey work as fundamental to integrating diverse functions.

He also suggests there is no substitute for conversations with the customer. “Industries unto themselves are now helping large consumer-facing organisations around what can be synthesised from data. It’s all useful, but nothing has been a better source of consumer insight than one-to-one human interactions,” Holt claims.

“Our call centre is a treasure trove of that information.”

But with more than 1 million valuable customer interactions every year, the challenge is how to distribute these at scale when a call centre consultant has to pick up the next phone call. CRM is a key part of the strategy, but there’s also a robust program of call listening to ensure people from across the organisation, from legal to back office, operations, senior leadership and more, spend time each year listening to live interactions with customers.

“This helps us all take new insights which can be so outside of the role they play – the revelations other colleagues have amazes me,” Holt says.  

Mercer’s onshore call centres also sit two floors below and above other customer functions, including marketing and digital teams, helping provide crucial physical interaction. Today, these customer service channels are increasingly involved in marketing and campaign planning and experience design.

“We continually focus on making sure they have voice in those forums and strategy conversations,” Holt says.  

“As a career marketer, I was very naïve in seeing world in black and white and through a marketer’s lens. Now I’m accountable for running a large call centre of 240 people commercially while staying focused on purpose of improving people’s lives, I certainly see the world differently.”  

Through all of this, Holt says the many parts of customer service across the enterprise need to be kept constantly in healthy tension. “If we go too far in using one channel for creating value and customer experience, other parts of the org and commercial realities can suffer,” he says.

“Forever more, retail organisations are going to have to keep opposing forces and tension around customer to deliver great value.”   

Up next: Audi rounds out our in-depth looking into how brands are bringing marketing and customer experience functions together