emergencemarketing.com

Based on some comments made during last week’s Innovative Marketing Conference, Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ ponders whether best practices even exist.

Bryan Eisenberg said that best practices are often times achieved under very specific conditions and can therefore not always be generalized. Len Ellis said, give me emerging practices, best practices are so yesterday!

All this rings so true. If a practice becomes a best practice that is replicable across other companies or industries, you have to assume that most of your competitors will have adopted that practice - thus giving your company no competitive advantage from embracing it.

What companies really should do is to avoid replicating “worst practices” - a practice which if you were from another planet observing what earth companies do you might conclude they do on purpose:

• Screw customers after they purchase products by treating call centers as a cost centers instead of customer relationship based economical centers
• Continuously interrupt prospects with rude and mostly out-of-context messages
• Treat employees as disposable cost centers instead of valuable customer interfaces
• Insult customers’ intelligence with stupid messaging or by blaming them for product failures.
• Grab a ton of information about prospects and customers and give them nothing in return - or worse - asking them for the same info over and over again
• …and so much more

Let’s ban the worst practices first, then let’s worry about best and emerging practices!

[Tags: customer information marketing customer service worst practices best practices]

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