Spend enough time talking to marketing leaders and you’ll hear conversations about brand strategy, customer personas and campaigns. Spend time with contact centre leaders and the focus naturally shifts towards customer journeys, operational performance and service delivery.

Customers don’t experience these elements separately, they simply experience the brand. Yet marketers and contact centres can often operate in silo, despite sharing responsibility for the same customer experience.

Customer Expectations

Every marketing campaign creates an expectation, and every advert, email, social media post and website interaction paints a picture of what customers can expect from an organisation.

The contact centre is where those expectations are brought to life. Sometimes they are reinforced, and sometimes they’re not, and we can all recall occasions when they are challenged. Either way, it’s where customers decide whether the brand they were promised is the brand they receive.

It’s where tone of voice becomes more than a set of brand guidelines and it’s where values are tested under pressure. It’s where frontline colleagues can turn a frustrating moment into one that strengthens trust and builds loyalty.

The good news is that there are plenty of organisations that are already showing what’s possible. One example I heard during the event was in relation to a prominent, globally-renowned airline, which was using conversational intelligence from customer interactions in the contact centre to highlight emerging issues, customer frustrations and the success of recent ‘product’ tweaks.

Rather than relying solely on surveys or campaign metrics, the organisation could hear the customer’s unfiltered voice every day. The marketing team was able to use the insights gleaned alongside working closely in conversation with their colleagues on the frontline to refine their messaging, adjust customer communications (on both sides) and ensure the promises made through advertising aligned with the experience customers were receiving.

Working in Partnership

Where marketing and contact centre teams work in partnership, customer conversations become more than service interactions and marketing moves beyond creating expectations to understanding how those expectations are experienced by customers. The contact centre becomes recognised not simply as a service function, but as one of the most important expressions of the brand.

The conversations I have had with marketers and contact centre leaders alike have helped enforce my view that brand can never solely be seen as a marketing campaign. It doesn’t live in a logo or a set of values displayed on an office wall. It lives in thousands of everyday conversations, and the organisations that recognise this aren’t simply creating better customer experiences. They’re building stronger, more credible brands through those interactions.