Bad Service Nullifies Advertising

Studies show that insurance uptake or penetration in East Africa is quite low. Going by the number of advertisement going round you may notice that insurance companies spend a lot of money on advertising yet such investment does not translate to revenue.

Could it be related to how badly or insincere their sale representatives are? Have you noticed a stark difference between what is promised in the advert and what the sales representative tell you?

Now compare this to a successful company like Safaricom. Can you spot the difference?

Much of the advertisement investment made by major retailers, manufactures and service companies would usually evaporate the moment a customer enters their store, hotel etc and walked into a non-supportive psychological environment. In simpler terms you walked in and found a clueless salesperson who offered no assistance whatsoever due to either arrogance or ignorance of their products.

All your company’s promotion, advertising, marketing and goodwill can be ruined by one rude or indifferent employee.

Money spent on advertising is largely wasted when customers show up in response to it and are turned away by indolence, insolence, ignorance, insincerity, indifference and aloofness.

Most companies assume that it is inherent to all employees to know how to deal with customers. If they do know they are not applying their knowledge. Employees do not arrive on the job with a full blown set of service skills.

Viffa Consult advices advertises to allocate a portion of their advertisement budget to development of learning programs for employees in order to reinforce media programs with customer service knowledge and skill.

Advertising brings customers in the door, but bad customer service sends them right back out the door again.

Our research on manufacturing companies in Kenya  that are constantly  looking for ways to cut down on market share erosion without spending too much shows that their advertising sold 17% of its products, the balance 83% was sold based on company’s reputation, past customer experience, word of mouth etc

The conclusion would be that the money spent on advertisement is not ideally translating to sale of many products.

Manufacturing companies need also to understand that they are in service industry and would therefore make the paradigm to service orientation or they will be left behind by competitors who realize that service adds products value and customer loyalty.