Valerie Mathieu - A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services

Marketing suffers from many prejudices and is often referred to in a pejorative way in order to discredit or denigrate people, approaches and actions. It is considered vulgar, manipulative and even dishonest. In some sectors, it is now clearly in conflict with aspirations for sustainable development and greater social justice. In industrial, technical and scientific environments, where it is well established within large companies and organizations, it is still little appreciated by the players because it is probably not well known. Is it then to counter these negative energies that the title of Chief Customer Officer is now more easily given to the old-fashioned Chief Marketing Officer? Or should we see it as a final questioning of marketing’s actual capacity to take an actual interest in the customer, so that it is necessary to integrate its raison d’être into its title?

It is not uncommon to hear marketers themselves complain about their difficulty in “getting their strategy down”, implementing their plans and actions, and to encourage managers to use the tools they develop. These complaints are particularly common in service and B2B environments, because in these environments, marketing has difficulty achieving its objectives without the collaboration of field managers. Marketing undeniably suffers from being confined to its own function and department, which gives it a bureaucratic image, far from the reality of the field and the operational people. It is, therefore not surprising that its plans, strategies, actions and tools do not arouse much enthusiasm among employees. On the other hand, marketing and customer orientation have always recognized that they cannot be confined to one department or one function, but that they must be implemented with the support and involvement of the entire organization. It has, therefore, become a challenge for the marketing department to succeed in involving all the company’s employees, and especially the managers, in the achievement of its own objectives. The interrelations and interdependencies between marketing, operations and human resources have always been at the heart of the specificity of service management. The questioning of the interrelationships between marketing and sales is going in the same direction, and we are witnessing a merger between the marketing function and the sales function, with the emergence of new marketing and sales departments.

The solution to involve managers in the implementation of a marketing culture, strategies and tools would be to increase their competence in customer orientation. For companies without a marketing department, the customer-focused manager would become the key player in the deployment of a customer culture. The customer-oriented manager does not have to “do the job” of a marketing department, but must have the ambition to fully integrate the customer into his/her vision and actions. The marketing department and customer orientation will never be in competition but ideally in collaboration and synergy.

Increasing the manager’s customer orientation skills also has the advantage of responding to aspirations for autonomy and freedom in relation to what is often perceived as diktats emanating from headquarters and of moving towards greater horizontality. Customer orientation, by valuing the customer and, therefore, the relationship with the other and the human being, gives meaning to the work that the manager often complains of having lost. If the manager’s job no longer inspires dreams 18, wouldn’t enriching it with the confidence that the company has in them for maintaining its most precious asset, the customer, be likely to re-enchant it?

The term digital revolution clearly indicates the impact that digital technologies will have on society in general and on business in particular. Marketing is one of the privileged targets of this digital revolution and cannot survive without integrating it. We talk about digital marketing or e-marketing to gather strategies, methods and tools that rely on the Internet. Digital marketing is an undeniable means for marketing:

– to have access to the market since it has become a common habit for each of us to go on the Internet to search for information on an offer or a company;

– to maintain or increase its market share since the share of online commerce is constantly increasing;

– to enrich the relationship and the customer experience since the customer asks for a digital experience in addition to, or sometimes instead of, a physical experience;

– to launch new offers that can even be based on new business models since the economic model of platforms is constantly conquering new sectors.

Indissociable from the Internet and the digital revolution, data and customer data in particular, poses a triple challenge for marketing: technical (how best to collect and analyze data), strategic (how best to transform this data to create value) and ethical (how to create value from customer data without compromising their freedom and respecting their rights). The data issue is particularly important for B2B services 19.

Thus, initially adorned with many virtues, digital technologies pose new challenges to marketing: managing e-reputation, meeting the demand for transparency that the Internet has promised, working in the immediacy that the Internet allows for, rethinking the skills of marketers as well as salespeople, etc. But above all, the Internet questions the role that humans can retain in this immaterial channel of relationship to the market and the customer.

In a 2019 report 20, research firm Forrester notes:

In reality, a flood of repetitive messages now inundates consumers. They’re exhausted by the endless drone of bland ads that follows them around the Internet, clogs their inboxes, and interrupts their social media feeds. Over time, customers’ receptivity to marketing has eroded, their interest has waned, and they’re actively taking steps to block out the noise with tools like ad blockers and intelligent agents (e.g. Amazon’s Alexa).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is progressively penetrating companies to simplify, streamline and optimize many tasks and processes. Marketing is using AI to enhance the customer experience through, for example, chatbots, robots and other facial recognition technologies. In a recent study on customer evaluation of AI, Cap Gemini manages to show that customers are quite satisfied with the experiences they have with AI technologies but that human intelligence remains essential to build a truly exceptional experience 21. In the same vein, Yann Le Cun, head of AI research at Facebook and a major researcher in this field, explains in his latest book that AI does not have a common sense or a global representation of its environment that would make it possible for it to react to new and unexpected circumstances (Le Cun 2019). Hence, human intelligence remains unique and essential today to analyze and react to new situations.

The challenges of digital technologies, data and AI are real and strong. The company must fully address them, and marketing is in the best position to integrate them into the customer’s perspective: its status as a function attached to the top management, its resources as a major department of the company and its global vision of all the company’s businesses and markets, more than authorize it to do so, oblige it to do so. And yet, human element, through its intelligence, sensitivity and proximity, remains necessary in the construction of a full customer relationship and can even become a valuable counterweight to the potential drifts of the all-technological approach. By effectively sharing the customer orientation with the manager, the marketing perspective regains or maintains its humanity. Nevertheless, the manager must remain vigilant in developing and maintaining a mastery of these technologies, which will be more and more essential in the exercise of his/her responsibilities.