By Hilda Basson-Namundjebo
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outside on our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so” – Mahatma Gandhi
2025 will probably go down as the year where humans worked with humans supported by AI. A rather sobering thought, no matter the field of service we find ourselves in. A year which will require even more empathetic and proactive engagement with customers in order to yield the success that we hope our business will be renowned for.
Business presents a convergence point for people; employees serving customers who come to you to have a specific need met. Important to note that employees are people too and at times they can be customers as well. Banks, retailers and insurance companies come to mind and they can provide the perfect opportunity for the co-creation of business solutions.
I recently took a stroll down memory lane in an attempt to understand how marketing has changed over the last 10 years. While the four P’s remain largely entrenched, in the field of service marketing an additional two P’s are relevant. These are the people who deliver the service and the process of service delivery. Therefore, my emphasis on employees and attitudinal excellence.
Employees deliver the brand experience and remain at the core of how well you perform especially, when you are in the service business. This by no means excludes businesses in product delivery, where quality standards rule supreme.
Due to the high nature of contact between customers and staff, design process thinking is important to ensure reliability and efficiency. Marketing requires an approach, rooted in systems thinking where one identifies all touchpoints until customer satisfaction is achieved and/or exceeded. So in the words of Steven Covey “being with the end in mind”. In a world fixated with fraud prevention and the obligatory “know your client” governance framework, imagine what were to happen if we became equally committed to “know your customer”? And then meet their needs and aspirations?
Service marketing is complex, because the heart of marketing is people. And people are complex with a penchant for instant gratification.
However, a customer is more than a target to enable you to meet budget, for they are human beings too. Fickle human beings with aspirations, dreams or problems to be realised or be solved. Phillip Kotler, the father marketing states emphatically,” if you don’t care about human beings, you shouldn’t be in marketing because it is your job to address people’s pains, inspire their hopes and cause them to dream.”
Its not often that we think about marketing in this way. Far too often we think more about the product we wish to introduce, so much so that we forget it is our role to understand customers and in some way be the conveyor belt to the rest of the organisation.
Understanding people requires great effort. As marketers, we started out with an understanding on consumers as a broad term. Then in time, we learnt to appreciate that segmentation matters. That in marketing there is nothing like the general public and upon attaining that understanding, marketing evolved to the point that we now seek further understanding of our customer to the point that we must understand what triggers their behaviour on an individual basis. Personalisation in service delivery is the crux.
So how well will you do that in 2025, and going forward? And more specifically, how will you deploy the opportunity AI presents? Economist Richard Baldwin states “AI won’t take your job, but someone using AI, might”.
It starts with data – data that will inform you as to where you may meet your customers. Once you know where they are, you then embark on a customer journey where you will understand their moments of truth. What are moments of truth?
Moments of truth refer to the “moments when a customer or user first contacts customer service”. This engagement is as per the adage that “first impressions count” and will generate feelings or opinions about a company, its service quality and how their performance is aligned with their experience.
When you communicate, whether verbal or non-verbal, how do make your customer feel? This exerts enormous pressure on advertising and PR agencies because we must deepen our skill set beyond the ability to design an award winning advert or write world class copy.
And while that remains important, it has never quite been as critical as now to be able to generate consumer insights and to deliver work that moves the needle. The benefit is that we still have the exclusive ability to be able to understand humans as humans, while AI requires human oversight.
I am convinced that the big winners will be the companies who are passionate about serving people and doing that well; companies who have embedded a human centric model into their organisational culture.
Customers are people and so are employees – how we optimise that presents an ideal opportunity for a symbiotic and prosperous co-existence.
“Take care of your people and they will take care of your customers”, J W Marriot!
*Hilda is a seasoned broadcast journalist, entrepreneur and television host. Founder of the national brand and organisation Team Namibia, Hilda believes her purpose is to impact the world with kindness, one engagement at a time.
