Product Strategy and Why It’s Crucial

Given the total number of brands in the world today, products and services can become generic and commodities more quickly than ever before. As a result, your company shouldn’t rely on new product offerings as your key innovation tool or to create a sustainable success.

Instead, being able to differentiate your product from all others is the best hedge against becoming a commodity and the best way to protect your marketing and positioning investment. Today, what often defines a brand against all others is the level of customer service that supports the daily use of a company’s products and/or services.

It’s common to discover that customer service is given five times the importance in selecting one company over another, or even more weight than a particular product’s attributes or its price. Why is this? Because customers want to make a product choice and, from then on, be able to rely on the company they purchased from to stand behind the product’s ongoing performance and remedy any fixes necessary.

Yet, many companies concentrate on the lead-generation portion of their “sales and marketing program” and ignore their level of customer service. This is particularly true in today’s challenging markets in which customer service departments are being thinned to preserve the bottom-line. The net result of this can be disastrous. And yet, many companies will spend excessive amounts on bringing new customers through their front door using SEO and other internet marketing tools while losing the same or greater number through the back door.

To not fall into this front door/back door trap, here are a few things you could institute at your company:

1) Organize your customers’ experiences into a cohesive program that everyone on your team could easily provide services for at any part of the program, from the initial emailing to a sales call and on through technical customer service.