Frank "The Proposalnator" Lynn (author of this recent post) points me to an article in Fortune called "For Happier Customers, Call HR." It echoes something I heard recently at a talk given by the legendary Jac Fitz-Enz – namely that unless marketing backs up its taglines with some customer service people who drink the kool-aid, what you get is a load of customer experiences that don’t match with customer expectations.

The article tells the tale of customers of T-Mobile who were told they would "Get More," but instead got long hold times and clueless reps. So guess how you solve the problem? Put HR and Marketing together to make sure the people being hired match the values being promoted.

From the article:

Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But surprisingly few companies do it. "We call the gap between HR and marketing the ‘white space’ in organizations," says Don Schultz, founder of a think tank at Northwestern University called the Forum for People and Performance Management. "The customer-contact people don’t report to anyone in marketing or have any contact with them." Neither does anyone in HR, so HR isn’t able to put customer-service people in place who can deliver on the marketers’ message. Northwestern’s latest research (see ROI of Integrated Marketing at www.performanceforum.org) shows that both HR and marketing managers are well aware of the white space: "We started studying this because people from 40-odd big companies like Honeywell, GE, and AT&T asked us how to fix it." 

Read more for how T-Mobile addressed the problem.