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Organizational Frontlines: Why Marketing Communications Leaders Must Evolve With The Field

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Cameron Conaway

In the 1950s, the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company was around 60 years. Today, it is fewer than 20 years, with all signs pointing to a continued decrease. Innovation inevitably leads to disruption, and one result not often discussed regarding today’s rapid pace of innovation is how it has increased our choices of interfaces.

Consider Garmin. Once synonymous with in-vehicle GPS navigation, there are now countless other interfaces to choose from. Waze (owned by Google) and Google Maps have increased in popularity, and because Waze is under Google’s ownership, the underlying datasets and technologies between the two are likely quite similar. This means users are largely choosing between the two based not on which does a better job at getting them where they need to go but on which interface they prefer.

Marketing communications leaders, as consumers, are in a unique position; they get to explore what it’s like on both sides of the customer interface relationship.

Architecting The Customer Journey

What many modern marketers refer to as “touch points on the customer journey” is blossoming into an intriguing, transdisciplinary academic field referred to as "organizational frontlines" (OF).

A paper in the Journal of Service Research by Jagdip Singh et al., titled “The Emergent Field of Organizational Frontlines,” provides this as a definition: “We define OF as the study of interactions and interfaces at the point of contact between an organization and its customers that promote, facilitate or enable value creation and exchange.”

At the moment, the field concerns itself primarily with tracking the myriad ways in which brands and customers are communicating today and thinking about how organizations can best manage what’s happening at the intersection of interactions and interfaces to gain competitive advantages through improving customer experiences across touch points.

As today’s marketing communications leaders are often tasked with architecting the customer’s journey through the creation of engaging, on-brand customer experiences across all touch points, these leaders can benefit from dipping into the field of organizational frontlines to gather insights from those who are studying its development.

Establishing An OF Vision

It’s all too easy for marketing leaders to stay so busy in their day-to-day work that they can’t step back to see, let alone set the vision. At a talk I recently attended, David Jones of Microsoft’s Envisioning Center explained that it’s easy to become great at doing the wrong thing when you don’t realize it’s wrong.

To that point, it’s also easy for marketers to deploy a shiny new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered communications tool without first thinking through how it will change the customer relationship (perhaps for the worse).

And while many marketing leaders understand the importance of making an immediate impact on the digital frontlines, because they know that web visitors make snap judgments about a company based on its website (one study published by Google found that aesthetic judgments about a site are made within 50 milliseconds), it’s easy for the pursuit of learning to end there.

For these reasons -- plus the point that elite brands of the future will likely be those capable of shaping engaging, consistent organizational frontlines experiences -- it’s important for marketing communications leaders to carve out time to explore this field.

There’s a natural synergy between the world of academic OF researchers and the marketing leaders of today. One fascinating paper by Son Lam et. al., titled “Leveraging Frontline Employees’ Small Data and Firm-Level Big Data in Frontline Management: An Absorptive Capacity Perspective,” assesses how those touch points from frontline employees, coined “small data,” hold the key to unlocking big data insights that can improve the customer experience.

Exploring The Organizational Frontlines

Chapter 12 of The Power of Moments, by Chip and Dan Heath, opens with “Once you realize how important moments can be, it’s easy to spot opportunities to shape them.” This is precisely what the study of organizational frontlines can help marketing communications leaders do.

While there are certainly barriers between the practice of marketing and the academic study of marketing, OF has positioned itself as one of the most practical academic entry points I’ve found.

One way to get started is to read the piece from Singh et al., mentioned previously. From there, whiteboard with your immediate team all touch points you see as operating “on the front lines.”

Assess how you’ve architected those touch points, if they’re aligned with the touch points that follow and how you can create a more seamless customer experience. Conduct a project pre-mortem to determine when and where marketing communications efforts are most likely to break down along these touch points.

As part of this process, it’s also critical to evaluate every interface placed between you and your customers.

If you’re using a conversational marketing platform such as Drift, for example, think about how your organization’s use of it can further reduce customer friction. Could you save your customer time by creating a knowledge base integration or improving how your team handles the transition from chatbot to live chat?

To meet the expectations of today’s empowered customers, many marketing communicators stay up-to-date on the newest interface technologies. But as the pace of innovation allows competitors to more quickly close performance and feature gaps, I believe surpassing (not just meeting) the customer experience will increasingly be how brands differentiate themselves.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for how to surpass customer expectations, insights from the field of organizational frontlines will help marketing communications leaders go beyond simple engagement metrics and into a deeper, more empathic understanding of what’s working (and not) at the most critical points of contact between their company and their customer.

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