Let HRD solve Marketing Issues.....

Recently I viewed the video of the presentation of Deborah Rhodes during her appearance at TED. During the speech she has quoted Malcolm Gladwell stating "The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick". She goes on to state that this occurence "makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions. And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize have solutions." Before I continue with my post, I want anyone who has a woman to love in their life (and thats practically everyone) to view this talk by Deborah titled "A tool that finds 3x more breast tumors, and why it's not available to you."

What Malcolm Gladwell says is so very true. If you look around your office and see groups of people hudled in the conference rooms, there is a 9 out of 10 chance that they belong to the same department. They have probably got together to solve some problem or address some issue related to operations of the department.

Organizations define Key Performance Indicators and allocate them to various departments. So revenue is sales. Costing is finance. and so on.... Thereafter, these KPIs are the babies of each department and no body else is allowed to play with the baby or provide tips to the foster parents.

At one telco, there was a high amount of customer churn in the landline business after the first 3 months of activation. The role of keeping the customer active belonged to the "Retention Department." There was a whole lot of action happening in the retention department. I was called in to see if statistics could play a role. Having just two months of customer behaviour data did not excite he statistician in me. I decided to snoop around while I was at the premises of the company. I was also building CRM processes in line with eTOM for this telco. As part of this assignment, I was walking the process with the team responsible for installing the landline phones at the consumer site. One of this person stated that the sales person would ask the customer to just sign the acquisition form and would fill it up later in the office. While filling the form, the sales person would tick all options and services to be activated. When this person went for installation, the consumer would only be interested in knowing about voice calls since that was all he wanted. However, when the bills came in, the consumer saw an 'inflated' bill since he was also charged for services that he did not need. The installation person stated that he could not help the consumer since the installation process did not allow him to revalidate the consumer services and to deactivate the ones the consumer does not need.

This discussion connected the dots. The consumer saw a high amount on his bill for just 'voice telephony.' To him, the telco was overcharging him. Nobody explained to him the rentals charged for services that were activated for him because the sales person ticked the options in the application form. The consumer got upset over this payment and would request for disconnection in the second month. Before he could be disconnected, the telco required him to pay his outstanding till date. So a second bill was generated. This showed that majority of consumers churned in the third month.

If only, the retention department had involved every one who had a consumer touch point in trying to understand the problem at hand.

For that matter, the Human Resources and Finance departments may also have some solutions to the problems of say, the Marketing department.