I began in an earlier post to explore the various reasons why marketing can be thought of and directed as a company-wide responsibility and process. That conversation should include the essential cooperation between marketing and other departments in order to solicit, obtain, and analyze customer feedback. Marketing departments often seek customer feedback for themselves, and perhaps for their sales group, but that is as far as it usually goes. For example, marketing departments often collect feedback that is intended directly for their own use, exemplified by questions such as:

• How did you hear about us?
• Did the brochures/website/etc., answer your questions?
• Why did you ultimately choose us?

The feedback that might be generated as a result of these questions can be used for direct analysis of the effectiveness of the marketing department’s campaigns, collateral, and value proposition. Another category where a marketing department might often collect customer feedback is regarding the sales process. These type of questions might be used to evaluate sales strategies, sales effectiveness, and the effectiveness of tools that marketing provides to its sales group. Such questions might look like this:

• Did you get a response to your inquiry in a timely fashion?
• Was the sales person knowledgeable?
• Was it easy to understand what the product is/does?

While both of these feedback categories are highly valuable, there are some others that may be of interest to other departments. For example, product management might be interested in failure rates of certain components, complications encountered out-of-the-box, and general product and feature specific feedback. However, product management teams—and R&D, and business development—may not necessarily have the tools in place, the know-how, the channels, or the bandwidth to efficiently collect customer feedback in ways that are broad-reaching and representative. This is the expertise of the marketing group! The cooperation between marketing departments and other departments is essential in terms of getting full pictures of customer satisfaction, problems, and needs, of opening new markets, and of guiding product development. As marketing professionals, we are going to have the best systems and channels to obtain data that is essential for the self-evaluation and improvement of our entire company.

If that were not enough, the best part is that all such feedback is immediately relevant to marketing concerns. All this customer feedback, even if designed to be directly informative to another department, is extremely valuable to marketing professionals. It can all be repackaged in one way or another into marketing content that is “in the customer’s language.” Whether you ask to use direct customer quotes from feedback in marketing material, or whether you simply find ways to address the concerns that you found to be prevalent amongst your feedback sample, you end up with better customer-facing content. It’s a win-win!

This sort of feedback has specialized uses in web marketing as well, as any such collection of customer experience will help you better understand what key words your customers are using to describe their problems and your solutions and, simply put, key words are keywords.

Reference: Marketing > Education as Marketing