As I continue my journey in the feedback analytics environment, I come to a realization that there are some serious disconnects between marketing – usability – and customer service.  You may say, duh! or why do you think so? but after working with B2B prof. in all three arenas, I come to find this:

Media Marketing spends $$$ to get the agencies to place serious attention to your product. This attention is then led to physical brick and mortars and/or websites.  The Media Marketing department says – ok – job well done….next.

NEXT?!  The people start coming to the sites, brochure or interactive sites, and begin to further work with the brand…Digital Marketing is doing its best to make sure everything is working well, capturing traffic, focusing on user navigation, cookies, analytics – a bunch of technical blah blah that works into usability and the web optimization.

Customer Service patiently awaits the customer calls from the traffic generated, to either trouble shoot or assist with to ensure proper retention.

umm…what was missed?

The customers that came to the digital touch points began to uncover problems in their experience. Usability Prof. do not have the means to address every unique situation so they work out the kinks as quick as possible to ensure proper optimization, but often that data is gathered via analytics, not user voice.  Customer service is trying to regain confidence in already frustrated audience – but what if their calls were prevented by an intermediate source of communication which made the crowd fall at ease….the Human Factor…a way to just say what is on your mind while you’re thinking it…not later, not when you’re really ticked off….right there on the spot.

Better yet – what if the information stated by the user was measured to prevent the next mistake of the same kind?

It seems the idea of measuring human voice seems not “computable” enough to measure…so the technical means of measuring issues, and benchmarking progress seems to fall on session info, bounce rates, and exit pages….but if you could only ask:

Dear Prospective Customer, WHY? did you do this, or this, or this, and how did it make you feel?