Five stars for The Marketing Gateway!
Does customer service really help with marketing? As a matter of fact, yes!
Word of mouth is extremely important to consumers when looking into a brand, so a bad experience for one person could completely put another off your brand without any input from you!
And while taking care of your customer is important, taking care of your employees is important too. They are often considered the face of the brand after all!
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes:
https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Now that we’re out of the holiday season and back to work, it’s time to do that time-honored tradition of swapping stories about terrible customer service experiences we recently endured. And because I do a lot of my shopping online these days, mine are pretty minor – putting up with a few long lines when I just wanted to buy something small, or having to endure a little bit of a sharp tone from a frustrated cashier here or there.
But when I need to hear horror stories, I can always turn to Reddit.
So, here’s a story where a person set up a prepaid online pickup at Sephora that was supposed to be ready in a couple of hours, but the person working in the store didn’t pick and hold the order like they were supposed to.
So instead of apologizing to the customer and, y’know, trying to make them happy, they advise the customer to cancel the order, and the customer winds up doing that and picking it up somewhere else.
Here’s another one where shoe customer has bought two pairs of the same shoes from a manufacturer and both pairs have fallen apart within a few months. It looks like they’re wearing them for hospital shifts. And this is a $100 pair of clogs, by the way.
But what’s amazing is that the shoe company decides to respond with an exchange that ends in a very patronizing email blaming the customer, not the shoe, for the issue and then refers them to a shoe repair shop.
Fortunately for the customer, some of the commenters are happy to tell them about other brands to buy. I have a feeling they won’t be buying any more Birkenstocks.
Here’s one more where a person tried to move a phone line over to Verizon and had a series of encounters with customer service representatives who promised to fix the problem with specific actions and then did nothing about it. And then it finally gets to the point where the customer is getting socked with these giant bills because nothing was actually done, and they’re in a situation now where they’re trying to resolve things through the FCC and mandated arbitration.
And then you scroll down into the comments and find out… whoops! Verizon just had its largest single layoff in November, letting 13,000 people go, and they’re planning another one in the Spring. And what does this new CEO have to say about this?
It’s exactly what you’d think. He says they’re facing customer churn from raising rates, and so now their customer satisfaction scores are down, worse than the competition, because employees haven’t had what he describes as “the financial flexibility” to fix things.
And he describes their problems as “self-inflicted wounds.” Seriously.
I’d like to note that the CEO this guy replaced, who was tossed out for taking Verizon down from the top position to third in the United States, had a total compensation package of around $25 million and gets to remain on as an advisor this year and keep another $20 million of his compensation.
By the way, in my very unscientific reading of Reddit, I noticed more complaints about Verizon within the last month than any other brand, often for situations exactly like this.
Another major complaint I found was about AI-supplied customer service from major brands. It sounds like a nightmare to deal with.
And a third, unsurprisingly, was about problems with shipping companies – especially FedEx and UPS, which makes sense in December.
But all of this leads me to ask… if we know poor customer service undermines the credibility of brands in a way that may lose customers forever and that great customer service makes customers for life, why are there so many brands who think customer service is something they just ought to pay lip service to?
Does having good customer service really give brands a true competitive advantage?
We’re going to find out today.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
OK, so I know a lot of people in different kinds of marketing roles, and I realize a lot of them view marketing and customer service as being two very different things. But I also want to establish that for customers, they are not.
To a customer, marketing is about making promises that a brand is supposed to keep, and customer service is about supporting those promises when things don’t work out the way they’re supposed to. So if you’re a big company like, say, Verizon, and you do all this advertising to attract new customers but you’re also turning over a bunch of your existing customers because you don’t take care of them, it’s like setting up a purchase funnel with a ring of fire at the end.
So I did this project a few years ago and I was trying to uncover what makes a successful brand. And when you just go by revenues, what you find is a bunch of conglomerates and holding companies. So that’s no good. Then I started looking by which brands are the most popular, and I found a lot of the ones you’d expect – Apple, Google, Amazon, Chick-Fil-A, Starbucks and so on – but it was really hard to understand why they were popular. It didn’t necessarily have anything to do with size, because there were grocery store brands and niche consumer product brands on there, and it also didn’t have anything to do with generational cohorts, because some of those brands cut across every generation, even if you wouldn’t expect them to.
And so I kept digging, and I noticed that the one explanation that did hold weight was the companies who tend to intersect with us in our daily lives and also offer a superior product or brand experience tend to be the ones we like the best.
So one very popular brand is Tide detergent. I’ll be honest and say I don’t have a lot of feelings in any direction for detergent brands. It’s liquid or powder you put in your washing machine along with your dirty clothes. It’s about as utilitarian a product as you can have in your house.
And yet Tide continues to enjoy 30% market share in a very competitive space, and this is despite some negative press they’ve had in recent years about their Tide Pod product being mistaken for candy.
(SOURCE: https://nextsprints.com/guide/procter-gamble-tide-product-teardown-analysis)
So, why is Tide so popular as a brand? It’s because there are a lot of people who value their clothing and who have come to the conclusion that Tide does a consistently good job of keeping their clothes clean. It helps their clothes to smell nice and to look nice, and Tide’s even made it easy to ensure they don’t overuse the product by offering an easy pour bottle or by creating products like the Tide Pods that are precisely measured for a load.
And you don’t hear a lot about customer service complaints with Tide because their parent company, Procter & Gamble, not only takes great efforts to maintain their strong reputation for quality products but also has a dedicated customer support team and generally stands behind their products. It’s not particularly notable customer service, but from what I can tell from people who’ve described the experience online, it works most of the time.
That brings us back to my point – Tide is a product that intersects with peoples’ daily lives, and it’s a superior brand people know they can trust. There may be other brands that are just as good – and I know there are, because my family doesn’t use Tide – but to those who trust the brand to keep their daily lives free of soiled, stinky clothes, the experience is reliable.
But it’s also a product brand, and products are a little easier for people to gauge because they have a tangible quality that makes them easy to try out and see if you like them. It’s a little more difficult with a service brand or with a product brand that also involves a heavy service component.
And yet one that absolutely nails it is Apple. Whenever you’re looking over lists of the best customer service providers, Apple is often one of the top choices. It’s kind of stunning to me because Apple is a technology company that engineers mass market electronic devices, and yet people feel very personally connected to the Apple because it has been so careful to market itself as a lifestyle brand.
Apple is a notable company in the way they design their products to be intuitive, attractive and simple to operate. The products are manufactured with exceptionally high standards, but Apple also keeps the number of models down to a minimum so they can more capably service them. People who like Apple products tend to like them because they’re reliable, easy, well-designed and attractive.
One of the ways Apple enhanced the experience of owning an Apple product is with its Apple Stores, where customers can take their Apple devices they’ve purchased through any retailer and get help and advice from a tech support station known as the Genius Bar. This is an unusual but smart strategy Apple has employed to utilize retail to not only aid customers directly instead of relying on third-party partners, but keep them locked into their ecosystem with services like AppleCare and Apple’s upgrade trade-in plan.
Another brand that truly understands how to utilize retail to sell a product is Chick-Fil-A, which took the rather unpleasant drive-through model into a whole new stratosphere with a smart design that maximizes hands-on service while also providing speedy and efficient food ordering and delivery. Chick-Fil-A puts staff out in vests holding tablets to take orders directly from cars rather than relying on lousy loudspeakers, but the chain also ensures it’s staffed appropriately for busy times and that staff are trained to deliver superior service with evident high standards. One of the savviest things Chick-Fil-A does is train staff to respond to the words “thank you” with the phrase, “my pleasure,” which does an excellent job of showing the customer that the staff view themselves as service providers first. But Chick-Fil-A also invests in its employees and its culture, offering generous pay, assistance with families and college tuition and Sundays off. The result is happier, less harried employees who then in turn provide better service.
Another retailer that tends to appear at the top of customer service scores is Costco, which is also well-known for treating its employees extremely well and also promoting from within. This helps them to retain employees so they don’t have to deal with the staffing churn many retailers have. More experienced employees are not only more efficient at their jobs, but also better able to provide service to customers because they understand how things work and where to find products.
Beyond this, Costco strives to deliver value to its members, often touting the notion that it views its annual membership fee as its profit margin and then working to keep prices down and value high. Costco carries quality products from name brands, but it also has an enviable store brand, Kirkland Signature, which is not just a private label brand that costs customers less, but also one that can compete directly with major brands in quality and consumer preference.
Costco also backs its products with an incredible return policy – you can return almost anything you buy at Costco within any timeframe, and staff are trained to make this as painless as process as possible. Does Costco get taken advantage of? Of course they do. There are communities online where people crow about how they’ve pulled one over on Costco by returning products no one else would ever take back, like playground sets or stained carpets or half-eaten food.
But Costco generally accepts these returns and serves these customers no because they’re too nice to have a stricter policy – they can always cancel a membership if a customer abuses the system too much. Rather, they’re smart enough to recognize that their extraordinary customer service goes a long way towards spurring word of mouth about how great Costco is. And while a fraction of customers may abuse the policy, most will simply shop there content in knowing they could return something if they really wanted to.
And this leads us to another customer service champion, USAA, an insurance company consistently ranked at or near the top of customer service scores. USAA’s mission is to serve those in the US military, and since I grew up as a military brat myself, I’ve been a member since I was in high school. I wouldn’t dare go anywhere else – when my wife and I first got married, we had an apartment fire that destroyed everything we owned. And the crazy thing is our renter’s insurance had just been added to the unit two days before the fire. USAA didn’t even bat an eye in taking care of us; they didn’t even ask us to prove we didn’t start the fire!
We didn’t, by the way. It was a neighbor burning unseasoned wood in a fireplace that’d never been cleaned.
But USAA isn’t just great because they took care of me. They strive to be the best insurance company out there by minimizing wait times at call centers, directing members to humans as quickly as possible and then empowering those human employees to actually be helpful. They do handoffs between employees very well and make members feel like they’re being cared for. And then there’s the dividend – every year, members receive a dividend based on the profits the organization makes. As USAA strives to pay claims responsibly, every member benefits financially from their disciplined approach.
It’s actually funny, because I often hear service companies talking about how they’d love to be as good as USAA at customer service, and yet they never want to invest in the things USAA does to achieve that success.
It’s sort of like saying you want to be an expert at classic literature but then just relying on film adaptations, study aids and Wikipedia summaries instead of reading the books themselves – if you can’t do the hard work of actually reading the literature you want to be an expert in, your effort isn’t going to get you any closer to your goal.
So, let’s come back to the reason I started talking about customer service and why it’s so important for marketing. We’ve talked about five brands now that do a great job of serving customers through careful design, having dedicated front-line staff who can help customers out and focusing on ensuring that their product or service does an effective job of meeting a customer’s needs. None of these brands are necessarily offering what’s objectively the best product or service, but all of them are offering a high-quality one.
And when you compare that to a beleaguered company like Verizon, which is shedding customers far faster than its competitors and then paying executives absurd amounts of money to put tens of thousands of experienced staff out of work instead of cultivating a culture where those employees are serving customers the best they can… well, it’s not hard to see why that’s a losing strategy. Nobody even cares about the quality of the phone network Verizon built. What they care about is that when they have a problem, they’re not being cared for.
And no amount of positive marketing or promotional pricing or public relations spin can turn around that kind of bad experience.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
PLUG
Today’s plug is for learning from your mistakes. And I mention this only because in the corporate world, I see a lot of organizations that stubbornly refuse to do it.
So let me offer an example. There’s an international restaurant chain that has a location near me that my son really likes. I’m not going to say its name, but I will say I worked for this company once, and it’s headed by a total clown. And I mean that quite literally.
This location of this popular chain makes a lot of mistakes. I’d say about one in five orders is wrong because the staff don’t take the time to confirm things with the customers. Getting the wrong order is bad for a lot of reasons. It slows down service. It angers the customers. And it means you’re just going to have to remake their food anyway.
The worst part of it is that the employees have an adversarial relationship with the customers. They assume the customers are dumb and that they, the employees, get things right more often than wrong. I know how it feels. I’ve been in their shoes. People are terrible about being able to articulate what they want when they’re ordering.
But the way to deal with that as a service provider is to check to make sure you got it right, both when you take the order and then when you hand it to them.
To err is, of course, human, but to err all the time because you refuse to look at mistakes as a teachable moment? That’s no good.
This is a small example, of course, but I see it happen all the time at a much larger scale in the corporate world. Some organizations create products or services that are doomed to fail and launch them without consulting anyone who might have advised them otherwise. Others go through a rebranding process without ever questioning if it’s necessary or whether or not the new brand will make sense to the public. And still others insist on utilizing outdated service models that don’t make any sense anymore, often at great expense and annoyance to their customers.
So let’s make 2026 the year we try to learn from our mistakes. I know I am. And I hope you are too!
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