Customer-facing roles are all positions that in some way engage with the customers. In this Expert Insight Interview, Juliana Stancampiano talks about customer-facing roles and the power of teamwork. Juliana Stancampiano is a successful business leader, entrepreneur, CEO of Oxygen, and published author.
The interview discusses:
- Customer-Facing Roles
- Empathy and Communication
Customer-Facing Roles
The most popular customer facing roles are in marketing, sales, and customer service. Marketing speaks to the audience, sales closes the deal, and customer service enhances the customer experience. Sometimes marketing people do not think they have direct contact with the customers because the interaction is not two-way as in sales and in services. That is why some marketing companies started to create their strategies based on real people instead of imaginary personas. Even though these are separate departments focused on their own work, they must find a way to collaborate with each other. It is easy for sales to blame marketing why something was a failure and vice versa, but improved communication between departments will bring greater success with customers. Nowadays customer service experience will either “make or break” the deal, thus companies such as Microsoft renamed many of its services to focus more on customer success because that is where customer satisfaction and loyalty come from. The real growth comes from repeat customers, so companies have to adjust their services to benefit their current customers during the pandemic.
Empathy and Communication
The key to improving customer-facing roles in the future is to have empathy not only for the customers but for the team that you work with as well. People should continuously try to walk in other people’s shoes. For example, a seller should be comfortable to approach the marketer at any time to ask for the explanation of why something is done that way. That will enable the seller to get some value from it as well. In order for the teams to collaborate and work together, there must be deeper communication between the teams where everybody feels comfortable to ask as many questions as needed. That enhances both employee performance and customer experience. The common mistake people do is that they are afraid to ask questions. Many times, during the meetings, people do not understand things but are still reluctant to ask. Therefore, the company needs to create a company culture in which people feel safe to ask questions when something is not completely clear. Those little silent treatments can produce little mistakes, but if they pile up, it can accumulate to a bigger problem. Overall, clear internal communication within the company will make everyone to be on the same page, which will automatically improve customer experience.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
Comments