Marketing

I decided to dedicate this blog to the hard-working marketing department. These dedicated people who spent several years slogging away at university.

These wonderful university graduates thoughtfuly produce the literature that appears in our mailings and advertisements. They painstakingly and dedicatedly stoop all day long over the designs. They pour their heart-felt souls into producing the mail shots that will attract customers to the business.

Then they send them all out at the same time.

Is this the same for every company’s marketing department? I can’t answer that one.

For the time that I’ve worked at this company (I’m part of the foundations by the way) our marketing department have always operated in the same way. They have these wonderful ideas for mailings and advertisements and then publish everything all on the same day.

We are an insurance company dealing with domestic properties, including tenanted dwellings, and we offer many different types of insurance. Not to mention the extra policies available on the net.

This week we have mail shots going out for three different single policies, three different combined policies, and then for the landlords covers. Great! Call queues galore.

We now have non stop calls coming through for new policies, as well as customers ringing to change details or general enquiries. On top of that we’ve got people ringing with questions about the policies on the net, which are also on special offer at the moment. We haven’t even got time to breathe, never mind think about what we are doing.

Where is the sense in this? I know any company will want new customers, and the more the better. But trying to get so much new business all at once when there is not enough staff to cope is ridiculous.

Because there’s such a high call volume a lot of potential customers are giving up. Why should they be kept waiting for 15 minutes before they can even speak to anyone? Of course they’re going to hang up and go elsewhere. So there’s a lot of business being lost needlessly.

If these mail shots and ads were sent out one at a time, maybe ten days apart, the staff would be able to cope with the volume of new business. Potential customers wouldn’t be kept waiting so we wouldn’t be losing as many. But surely this should be common sense? Obviously these particular graduates don’t have the organisational ability that should, in reality, go hand-in-hand with marketing.

It’s not rocket science. It’s a simple matter of communication between departments – check that there’s adequate staff. If there’s mail shots being sent out, then stagger the drop. And definitely don’t send them out at the same time as the offers go live on the internet.

As I menitoned, I don’t know if this is the same in all or most companies. If it is, then no wonder our economy is in a sorry state with so many companies closing down. I hope our company doesn’t close – it’s a big international company so I can’t see it happening. They do need to learn from their mistakes though, and at the moment that does not seem to be happening.