Successful businesses are customer-centric. They invest enormous effort and resources into streamlining communication between their customer-facing departments in order to maintain an exceptional level of customer experience.

Sales, customer success, and customer support are all Human-Interfacing Departments (HID). They embed valuable customer insights to the marketer. Knowing how to integrate these insights smartly into your workflow, can unlock greatness. I’m talking high-impact, high-performance results that will give you a real competitive edge.

Marketing & HIDs Interactions

In the past, marketers treated HIDs as separate entities (many still do). Today, you will find more marketers investing in mastering this domain and learning its impact on revenues. What’s more, they are tightly collaborating with these teams.

The worst of us still see HIDs as separate entities that mess up our beautiful marketing masterpieces.

The better of us have what I call ‘one-way-street’ communication with the HIDs. We align the HIDs with our marketing initiatives by sharing updated messaging, promotions and product marketing materials. But that’s where it stops and we don’t develop any meaningful interaction or get anything in return.

The best of us recognize that the HIDs are a vital extension of our marketing efforts. In other words, the HIDs are considered a valuable marketing channel and it is given the attention and the resources it deserves, similar to how we treat our Paid Search or our Social Media channels.

So, What’s So Intrinsically Valuable About the HIDs for a Marketer?

Here is a non-comprehensive list of the main customer insights an HID can provide and the impact each one has on a marketer’s scope of work and performance:

Qualitative Measurement of Your Brand’s Message Lucidity

How you deliver it: By listening to HID calls periodically, you can check whether your messaging is being served correctly or not. You invest a lot of effort in testing and perfecting your messaging on your website and other marketing collaterals. HID agents could be deviating from the scripts, brand messaging guidelines or simply use outdated scripts and pitches when communicating with customers. This confuses the customer, harms conversions and builds negative sentiment toward your brand. You don’t want that.

How it’s being received: When the HID is serving the messaging as planned, listening in on their conversations with customers will help you understand if your messaging is being received well, clearly, and selling your product or service in the best possible way.

Qualitative Measurement of Your Product Offering

By listening to calls, you learn very quickly about the quality of your product offering. You get first-hand feedback about how good (or how bad) your product or service is, and what’s not working for the customer. What’s more, you can find out what the customer likes about your competition and how you stack up. But the best part is that you can just pick up the phone personally and have a more detailed discussion with these customers. Go ahead and “interrogate” them. You’ll get amazing feedback that you can integrate into to your product offering and marketing messaging.

Feedback on Customer UX

Your website’s copy, design and marketing all influence your customer’s emotional state. You want to make sure that you are pressing the right emotional buttons in order to move your customers one step further down your conversion funnel.

When customers interact with you online, you get quantitative feedback through CTRs and other on-page and funnel-context analytics. When customers interact with your HID throughout the funnel stages, you can hear (and sometimes see) their reactions. Through their tone of voice, questions and conversation dynamics, you can detect if they are calm, nervous, suspicious, confused, bored, thrilled or hesitant. This information is invaluable!

Resistance Mitigation

Not all types of resistance are known. And even if they are, it’s just a matter of time before they change. As your business grows, your product evolves and the competitive landscape changes. So will the resistance you will encounter. Your HID is probably one of the first places that will come in contact with new forms of resistance. Tapping into them will allow you to react much faster, calibrate your messaging and launch targeted campaigns and effective content. You’ll stay ahead of the competition and improve Sales’ propensity to close the deals.

Competitive Intelligence

You are always trying to learn what your competitors are doing. It usually gets harder to understand the type of discussions, messaging and sales pitches your competition uses in deeper parts of the sales funnel. Debrief the HID, listen to calls, do some email mining and you’ll find some valuable gems.

Your Prospective Customers Are Also Your UI Mirror & QA

Your traffic lands on your website through different channels with various messaging. We like to think that we are in control of the user flow and content consumption around each conversion point. Being the case or not, there will always be some paths you haven’t thought about out or haven’t tested. Every now and then you’ll catch these cases by listening to calls and getting feedback from the HID which will help you imrpove your UI. Now, these ‘bugs’ may seem like minor issues better left for others to take care of like the QA team. But when technical issues occur or reachability to relevant content is absent, it affects your UX and this can damage conversions. For example, Google representatives have stated more than once, during SMX Advanced conferences and other events, that slow page load times may cause a user to develop a negative sentiment about the brand. So if a user says to an HID agent, “I clicked on the link in the email you sent me but the page didn’t upload”, then you’ve got work to do.

Higher Customer Profile Segmentation

Most of the time, you have your target audiences profiled and defined, at least the lion’s share of them. Through interaction with the HID, you can come across sporadic nuances in customers that can grow over time into a niche segment of its own. Once you detect such, you can now generate targeted messaging, campaigns and materials for this new segment and fine-tune your acquisition costs and sales conversion rates.

Source for Niche Campaign Ideas

By listening to customers, you’ll discover a goldmine of new campaign ideas, some small, some big, some very big.

Differentiate What’s Solvable

As a marketer, you want to drive as many leads as possible, and deliver them as "cooked" and ready as can be. You work hard to build different funnels and content by employing a mix of channels. That takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. But sometimes, the only way to get through to a specific customer segment is by direct human contact. Trying to force a sensitive conversion point using automated methods can cause leads to turn away or even develop a wrong perception of your brand. Whether it’s a trust barrier, pricing or a convoluted message you need to convey, sometimes the best thing to do is to “tease” the potential customers with exciting things that are to come. Then, drive the CTA to interact with a human agent in order to cross the sale chasm.

Throughout the years, I have seen many different types of interaction between marketing departments and HIDs. Some were nasty, some were outstanding and some purely unleveraged. The decision to collaborate with your HID offers many benefits and the results can be mind-blowing.

In a later post, I have shared 12 easy ways that you can uncover all the marketing treasures buried deep in your HIC with very little effort.