Great marketers know that every consumer touchpoint is too valuable to outsource to chatbots or low-cost overseas call-centres. In a rush for efficiency, many companies have forgotten a foundational truth of marketing: every single touchpoint with your customer is an opportunity — not an obligation to be offloaded. Whether it’s a website chat, a follow-up email, a service call, or even an order confirmation screen, these are the moments when your brand either builds a relationship or begins to lose one.
Too many businesses — particularly those obsessed with cost-cutting, driving leads via funnels and over-using automation — are handing these moments over to generative chatbots, templated auto-replies, or overseas call centres with little context and often poor English proficiency. This is lazy marketing. Worse, it’s disrespectful to your customers and damaging to your brand.
Let’s unpack why this approach is not just ineffective — it’s unacceptable for any business who wants to be around for more than the next few quarters.
Every Touchpoint Matters
A touchpoint is not background noise. Every single one helps shape perceptions and influences your customer or prospect. What you do with consumer touchpoint = your brand, delivered in important moments. If marketing is about building, creating and nurturing relationships, then every interaction must express your respect for your audience, your values, tone, reliability, and customer focus – in short, your brand. Every time the consumer sees or hears your brand, it should enhance the relationship.
We think of it as: each brand owns a brand piggy bank. Any time you have an opportunity to touch a prospect or customer, you are putting a brand chip into the bank or you are taking one out. Based on your current practices is your brand rich or heading for bankruptcy?
You don’t get to say you’re “premium” or “customer-first” in your branding and then delegate the actual customer conversations to tools and teams that don’t speak the customer’s language — figuratively or literally. Most consumers cannot hear what you are saying because your actions are too loud! You are judged on what you DO not what you say.
Inconsistent tone, clumsy grammar, or robotic replies break trust. And trust, once fractured, is difficult and expensive to earn back. The message you send your consumer is “I don’t care about you, I care about saving money” and for the most part, consumers are indeed getting the message.
Stop Saving Money on Marketing
Yes, overseas call centres are cheaper. Yes, AI chatbots can reduce support loads. But the real cost shows up in lower customer retention, reduced lifetime value, and damage to brand reputation.
Warren Buffett, when speaking to his Berkshire Hathaway leadership staff said “You can lose our money, I’ll understand. Lose our reputation? I’ll never forgive you.”
I’m not promoting wasting marketing investments, but once a dollar is allocated to marketing, saving a few cents by cutting corners makes no sense. Taking care of your prospects and customers should be #1 on that priority list. Remember, a support interaction that makes a customer feel like a number, ignored or misunderstood doesn’t just risk that sale — it risks every future sale and every referral.
Think of it this way: how many high-value customers are lost not because of your product, but because their one simple question was met with a copy-paste response or broken English from someone who didn’t understand the nuance? Their are always lots of competitors just waiting in the wings to lure your customer at the moment they are ready to buy. Don’t make your hard-earned customer look around for better options.
This is not a cost-saving tactic. It’s brand erosion dressed as operational efficiency. A good marketer, trained in the fundamentals of effective marketing always knows the difference.
“Good Enough” Never Is
Too many marketers are accepting a bare minimum standard of communication, collapsing responsiveness and relationship-building into performance marketing. They are throwing brand management out as they cannot measure it as minutely as a digital click, which is not always as it looks, BTW. A chatbot that answers quickly but without insight cannot be better than a human who answers thoughtfully and actually cares. In fact, it’s worse — because the customer has to repeat themselves or escalate the issue anyway. Every executive should try to communicate with their own company. Imagine the CEO of The Gap buying something in-store, providing their email “so we can send your receipt” and receiving 7 emails a day for the next 14 days from 9 different sister stores!? I am pretty sure they would be shocked and dismayed. Each irrelevant email is a consumer touchpoint that drives your customer closer to your competitor. What you call performance marketing, the consumer calls spamming, stalking, annoying and frustrating.
Marketing must do a lot more than just generate leads. It must build and maintain relationships. That means treating every touchpoint — not just the pre-sale funnel — with the same care, voice, and attention you’d give a keynote speech or campaign launch. Every touchpoint matters. Are you putting a brand chip in the bank or taking one out?
A customer service or support call is marketing. A live chat interaction is marketing. A how-to email is marketing. These are valuable, precious consumer touchpoints that are being wasted. In fact it’s even worse: they are damaging your brand! If these aren’t delivering value for your brand, they’re likely delivering damage.
Customers Are Not Dumb
Let’s call it what it is: using low-cost, poorly trained staff or generic AI tools to “handle” your customers is not just lazy — it’s disrespectful. We call it Repellant Marketing.
Customers know when they’re being brushed off. They can tell when no one invested in making their experience clear, helpful, or even human. And like always, they make a mental note. (Remember chip IN the brand bank or chip OUT).
We recently had a very unpleasant experience with Telus Mobile. We upgraded our iPhones but were not told all the “hidden fees” that we would have to pay. The young man was relentless and that should have shut down the whole conversation for me but I thought my wife would enjoy the upgraded camera as she is an exceptional landscape photographer/hiker.
When I tried to dispute these extra charges ($1,700+ !) , I could not find a method to dispute or question an invoice. Our choices were simple: pay this surprise bill + interest that was accruing monthly, or or face the wrath of the Collection Department and a hit to our credit rating.
Oh, the millions they must save by no providing a dispute resolution process to their customers. Pretty clever when you say it fast.
But wait. Will we continue to be a customer when this 2 year term is up? Will we renew our $250/mth subscription with Telus? A brand we know we cannot trust. A brand we know makes the short term decisions at the expense of their customers, designed to pump up this quarter’s shareholder report. Because the executive bonuses are based on this quarter’s sales rather than looking at the lifetime value of the customer and the health of the brand?
Every decade we continue to do business with Telus represents at least $30,000 in revenue to Telus. Plus, we will tell anyone willing to listen about our very shitty experience. Viewing this through a long-term lens, this does not look clever at any speed!
Are consumers made to feel like a cost centre, not a commercial relationship worth nurturing? It is very simple: if you don’t value your customers, they’ll find a brand that does, and we all know, there are always options.
Human-Centred Marketing
In a world flooded with automation and noise, real human connection is the standout experience. Until digital marketing came along, human-centred marketing was all we knew. To paraphrase James Carville, “It’s about the consumer stupid”.
Brands that prioritize thoughtful, clear, helpful human interaction — even if it’s just a well-written email or a support call that doesn’t feel like a script — are the ones that customers remember and return to. You can balance short-term (Performance marketing) with long-term (Brand management), build a strong brand and keeping your shareholders happy. In fact most brands who execute brand management well, claim it helps their performance marketing results!
Invest in this. Train your people. Script your chatbots with clarity and craft. Slow down and think it through from the consumer’s point of view. If you must outsource, do it with partners (human beings) who speak the language, understand the context, and care about the customer. Or better yet, hire less but hire better — people who understand what your brand stands for and can communicate that in every interaction with every individual. THAT was the promise of the internet to the business community. Did we ever blow that one! Makes me very afraid of what we will do with Artificial Intelligence during the next 25 years. (Yikes!)
Final Word: Respect the Customer or Lose Them
Marketing isn’t just what you say — it’s what you do. And what you do in the quiet, everyday touchpoints of product development, pricing and channels decisions along with promotion, service and support is what shapes brand loyalty and drives revenue.
So, no — outsourcing every customer interaction to chatbots and low-cost overseas labour isn’t “smart” or “innovative.” It’s lazy. It’s transactional. And worst of all, it tells your customers they aren’t worth your time.
Every interaction is a chance to build brand trust. Stop investing in repellant marketing that drives customers to your competitors.
