How Relationship Marketing Affects Branding

A relationship approach to sales affects brand delivery in two ways: it implies service representatives have knowledge about customers, and it allows time for brand reinforcement.

Relationship Marketing Implies Knowledge About the Customer

Many organizations today possess intimate consumer knowledge stored online. Some customers know this and are worried, in fact, about how much is known about them. Domino's Pizza was an early adopter of a CRM phone system that actually tells the order taker who is calling. This enables Domino's to address the customer by name before the customer has said anything. Tim Monteith, vice president of information services, understands this might seem "invasive" to the customer. ^[6] When your brand promise is to be the world's best pizza delivery company, you have to be careful with information. As a result, Domino's employees are told to ask who is calling, even though they already know.

When customer information is used with respect and not abused, sales can be delivered with great personal impact, configured for each person and saving everyone a lot of time. Many Web sites create a feeling of relationship by greeting you with your name when you sign in and, in the case of Amazon.com, by recommending other books based on your selections. Are these real relationships? Most of us would say no, but they utilize information that makes them appear relationship based.

Long-lasting relationships are based on honesty and consistency. Both values are challenging for organizations to deliver because many customers today have their needs met through multiple service representatives. If representatives deliver inconsistent messages, this inconsistency will be interpreted as dishonesty or incompetence. Yet CRM technology promises, or at least implies, that every organizational representative who interacts with customers can have enough knowledge to create at least a minimal feeling of relationship. Our experience, however, is that when a service representative is busy reading a computer screen filled with information about you, unless that is done very carefully, it is difficult to experience a feeling of mutuality, let alone one that is on an equal basis. Customers, after all, do not have a parallel screen providing intimate information about the salesperson.

Selling Creates Time for Reinforcing the Brand

The sales experience generally takes time, during which a brand can be communicated and reinforced. This is true whether a sale is handled person-to-person or online. The sales experience, in fact, may be the longest opportunity the organization has to interact directly with a customer. When surveyed, customers say they expect the sales process to be part of the total experience of buying the brand. ^[7]

Many organizations are structured, however, so that sales are isolated from the total experience of the brand. But researchers know that if a customer has a negative experience while purchasing, it tends to linger while he or she is consuming the product or service. This can include an unpleasant experience buying admission to a theme park, placing an order with a snarling waiter, being checked into a hotel by a disinterested agent, getting your seating assignment at an airport, or handling insurance information at a hospital or health clinic. In this regard, any negative generic customer experience will reflect poorly on the total experience of a brand, even if the bad service is not specifically off-brand.

Customers report that most of their positive feelings for brands, in fact, come during the service process—not from the sales process. ^[8] If this is the case, a major opportunity to develop the brand is being missed. Yet business commentator Peter Jordan points out that salespeople frequently blame customer dissatisfaction on everyone but themselves. He writes, "If a business' primary overall objective is to retain its good customers, then its reward structure needs to be pegged to that objective, rather than heaping glory and reward on the rainmakers who bring in new accounts as in a front-end commission arrangement." ^[9] In this respect, the brand experience, the magic, must be integrated into the selling process. Clearly, hard sales techniques are outside the boundary of what customers want.

^[6]Peter Jordan, "The High Tech Way to Hold the Anchovies," VarBusiness (January 1, 1996)

^[7]Panayiotis Kyzirdis et al., "Sales Management: Re-engineering the Sales Force for Relationship Marketing" (Symposium, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research, Amsterdam, 1996).

^[8]Brand expert Daniel Finkelman reports that 20 percent of satisfaction in the industrial paper industry comes from the selling process, while 52 percent comes from customer service; in the automotive industry it is 16.8 percent from sales and 33.6 percent from customer service; and in telecommunications, less than 20 percent of satisfaction comes during the buying process, while 40 percent comes from customer service. Daniel P. Finkelman, "Crossing the Zone of Indifference," Marketing Management 2 (1993): 22–31.

^[9]Peter Jordan mentions this point in several of his articles. For example, see "How to Make the Computer Telephony Sales," VarBusiness (January 1, 1996).