Martin Hill-Wilson

Social Media and Financial Services are getting to know each other pretty well.

There are some obvious opportunities to be grabbed. For decades B2C verticals such as banking and insurance brands have littered doormats and TV screens with broadcast style messaging. Yet even the most inventive direct marketing only provided one way response mechanisms as a token form of interaction.

The net result was ever diminishing returns from a generation of consumers that learnt to tune out the noise and instead preferred to seek...

Here’s what the Customer Service industry is missing: a service catalogue.

A what? It’s like a product catalog, only for service.

Your service in fact. The one you provide to your customers, courtesy of your customer service operation. It’s strange but true that service professionals never think of telling their customers what they ‘sell.’ For a product marketer, this would be the equivalent of forgetting to get dressed before going in to work!

Let me scene set a little more while you figure out if I’m nuts or onto something we might have all missed.

Why Product Marketing Is Smarter Than Service Marketing (for now)

The ‘no service catalog’ is a long standing soapbox topic for me. I was reminded about it again when I had the pleasure of being a guest presenter at one of the world’s top high fashion brands.

It was great...

As in all areas of life, the art and skill of listening matters.

Our work life certainly demands it. In fact customer listening and co-worker listening (new term?) are now core to keeping corporate headlights pointed in the right direction.

Given that’s becoming accepted wisdom, it’s both strange and unfortunate we don’t know a great deal about how listening works. Or for that matter find ourselves well educated in becoming good at listening. Either personally or organisationally.

Back in the day, I was lucky enough to absorb 27 sessions of communication skills training. Every week for three hours. All practical work. Building stamina and capability to...

The Customer Service Operations they work in are now entering a third phase of existence.

Just for the sake of this made up timeline, imagine ‘Phase One’ as the time when call centres were brand spanking new. They were the Social Media of their day 30+ years ago, built on the following revolutionary concept.

‘Being Interactive Without Being Face To Face’

In those days, ‘Quality and Experimentation’ ruled. Here’s an example: selling a contraceptive to farmers for their cows at 5.30am in the morning in order to catch them before setting off for milking! That’s a campaign pushing at the boundaries.

Then came twenty years of quite the opposite. The mission to massively scale...