• by Gary Leopold , Columnist, May 3, 2010

While everyone continues to ponder the continuous shift of marketing budgets from traditional media to digital (and social), I'm wondering why more marketers aren't shifting dollars to enhance their organization's ability to service guests and motivate employees.

Increasingly, the most vital marketing tool your business has is service -- the kind of impassioned, caring, anticipatory, authentic service that turns customers into brand advocates willing to spread (or worse, dispel) your gospel via their social media networks. Yet, we travel marketers all too often look to our brethren in HR and operations to stoke that all-powerful flame.

In a world in which TripAdvisor posts seven million reviews a year and nearly 20,000 per day, it's easy to see how a satisfied guest has the potential to be your most powerful advocate and the ultimate marketing avatar.

Zagat says that 48% of all the complaints it gets about hotels is related to service and for restaurants that number jumps to 70%. Worse yet, only 28% (fewer than 3 in every 10) of U.S. travelers believe travel companies are making a strong effort to make them feel like valued customers.

As the dark clouds of the travel economy steadily start to brighten, there's never been a better time to get marketing, operations and every other department to work holistically across the organization in cross-functional teams totally focused on amping the customer experience.

By adding your marketing dollars to this joint effort, you can fuel your brand's service culture and ensure that employees know that they don't just influence the guest experience, but that they are more than ever a critical front line member of your company's marketing team.

Jan Carlzon, the former chairman of SAS, many years ago wrote Moments of Truth in which he shared the belief that brands were shaped in a series of daily interactions of 30 to 60 seconds between your customer and your service staff.

It's time that marketing invested a piece of its budgetary pie to ensure that those so-called moments of truth are looked at with the same care, focus, creativity and wherewithal as the brand's latest marketing campaign. Because service (or lack of it), is the foundation of your marketing effort.

Surely, there are lessons to be learned from a company like The Container Store that recently declared this past Valentine's Day as "National We Love Our Employees Day," and from its Chairman/CEO, Kip Tindell, who proudly boasts that taking care of its employees translates directly into its employees taking better care of the customer.

They even went to all their suppliers and had them donate enough items so that every one of the company's 4,000 employees could have their own gift bag as part of this carefully orchestrated day of recognition. More than just gimmicks, its service culture includes more than 241 hours of employee training (versus an industry average of seven).

And, there's much to admire about the way in which Best Buy is pushing the social media envelope with @twelpforce in which its empowering its staff to answer questions and concerns on its Twitter feed. And while still a work in progress, it's an innovative approach to further empowering employees and literally putting them on the front line of a company's guest experience and marketing force.

Taking a look at how your marketing and service efforts can co-join should be a critical component of your business planning that deserves more than lip service. Increasingly, the challenge for all marketers is finding ways to connect the ever-expanding roster of communication and brand touch points -- and service is the one constant that stands at the heart of this evolving dynamic.

Ironically, the fate of your brand experience is often in the hands of the lowest-paid service person in your organization, standing behind a front desk or with a headset in some remote call center. Moving them up the food chain through innovative programs that recognize and reward their increasing importance in your marketing success will pay lasting dividends that other aspects of your marketing efforts never will.

As social media continues to evolve and grow, the key to truly harnessing its power starts with service. Because service is increasingly the new marketing.