|
Number
9: July 2, 2003
Please forward this newsletter to your colleagues and friends. If someone
sent this to you,
now so you don't miss an issue.
This week in Katydid:
Cox
Not at Home with Marketing
Here's a little public service announcement for those who may be using
Cox high-speed internet service. (There's also a little marketing lesson
in it.) If you use Cox at home or for your small business, you may have
encountered problems sending e-mail. The reason may be that Cox is
blocking access to your outgoing mail (your SMTP servers).
In additional to personal use, Cox Communications' home internet
service is very popular with businesses. Employees of large businesses
access their work e-mail accounts from home networks and small
businesses operate their domains remotely.
Recently, Cox Communications has taken some measures to prevent spam.
They've blocked access to SMTP (simple message transfer protocol)
servers, essentially blocking the ability of Cox customers from using
their own domain's outgoing mail servers. Cox customers can still
retrieve their e-mail from their outside accounts, but they can't send
mail through them. Instead, all accounts need to use the appropriate Cox
SMTP server to send mail.
This change has little impact, once you change your outgoing
mail server settings. You can send e-mail from your non-Cox mail
accounts and have it appear to be from your own domain. To your
recipient it will look the same as before.
However, this is a good example of bad customer relations and a
reminder that marketing needs to have some influence with customer
support. The fix for this issue is spreading by word of mouth rather
than through official Cox announcements.
Cox could easily have sent an e-mail outlining new service
improvements that help reduce spam and increase network performance for
their customers. In that announcement, they could have provided a link
for their customers that use outside mail servers. Instead, they chose
to block the mail servers and let their customer support team field the
(annoyed) inquiries. They have such
a page, but you have to call to complain to learn about it.
Your customer support team is a valuable marketing asset. Your
support staff needs to be champions for the customer. To do so, they
must be armed with as much information as possible. The more prepared
your staff, the better your company appears to your customers.
It's not necessary to install some complex customer management
software solution. That's for when you've already worked the bugs out of
the system. You can gain a lot of ground (and save a lot of business) if
each department asks, "How will this change affect everyone else,
and is there anything we can do to prevent problems?"
Top »
Bridging
the Gap between IT and Marketing
"You just don't understand me!"
"That's not true."
"Well, why didn't you tell me how important tracking was to
you?"
"I'm sorry; I though you knew."
"How was I supposed to know? You never share your real
feelings with me."
This soap opera goes on in many companies between information
technology (IT) and marketing departments. You may have experienced some
version of this as each team makes assumptions about what the other
group understands.
A recent
article from eMarketer quotes an Aelera
survey showing a huge gap in communications between marketing and IT.
According to the survey, 67% of marketers think they explain their
requirements well, while only 34% of IT workers agree. Conversely, 55%
of marketers think they give IT plenty of time to implement their
solutions and only 40% of IT workers agree.
I've seen this at many companies and it's a huge reason for scope
creep and blown deadlines. Having the rare opportunity to work for both
IT and Marketing in may career, I've seen this issue first hand. Neither
group willfully misleads the other; the problem stems more from how
traditionally isolated these teams have been from each other.
It's really with the advent of the web that marketing and IT have had
to work together on projects. You only need to pick up any Dilbert
book to understand how IT perceives marketing (hint: they typically
carry pitchforks). And Dogbert's
attitude toward Dilbert could easily model the marketers' views on IT.
In order to bridge this gap each group needs to know how to approach
the other. Marketers need to be specific when communicating with IT.
Don't suggest what technology you need. Rather, list what you need the
technology to do. Additionally, you can save headaches by involving IT
early. Just be aware that IT's job is to be gloomy. Like a new parent,
they see danger everywhere.
IT needs to remember that marketing does not create deadlines
arbitrarily; they live in an arbitrary world. Customers don't really
move in a cycle. Like elite soldiers, marketers need to be ready to
strike at any opportunity. They have strategies but often must abandon
them, or modify them as they move forward. The timing is always
compressed. Rather than saying it can't be done, it's best to say,
"Here's what we can do for you in the time (or the budget) we
have."
Additionally, if both teams follow the ideal documentation
sequence, projects will be more successful. That is, they should
create objectives, requirements, and specification documentation.
Following that scope and sequence, guides both teams through the logical
progression to ensure that everything that needs to be defined is
defined.
Oh, and marketers know they're evil, but don't need to be reminded
all the time.
Top »
Thanks for Reading
This e-mail newsletter spreads mainly by word of
mouth. Please forward it to your colleagues and friends. Also, you can
read other back issues.
If you have suggestions of web sites to review, writing that buzzes,
or a new way of looking at things, let me know. Send your suggestions to
.
If you received this newsletter from a friend, please
today. Our subscriber lists are confidential; we never sell or rent our
lists to third parties. If you want to
from this newsletter,
please let us know.
Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
Top »
|
