A consumer calls with a complaint and is answered by people who work for the brand, on a system marketing designed — and her case reaches the quality team in days. At Pronaca the contact centre sat inside marketing: I ran its telephony, its routing and a company-wide complaints workflow as part of the brand promise.
A food company's contact centre normally reports to operations, where it is managed as a cost. Here it reported to marketing, which changes what gets optimised: not calls per hour, but whether the brand survives the conversation. The company-wide complaints workflow came out of that reporting line, not out of a service project.
Managed as cost per contact. The metric is handling time, and every improvement points the same way: shorter calls.
Managed as part of the brand promise. The metric is resolution, and complaints become research instead of overhead.
Not because marketing runs phones better, but because the queue is where the brand promise is actually tested — and because the complaint stream is the highest-intent data the organisation receives for free.
Every other insight has to be bought: surveys, panels, trackers. The complaint arrives free, unprompted, from somebody motivated enough to pick up a phone. Most organisations treat that stream as a cost to minimise instead of the highest-intent data they own.
The contact-centre technology behind the operation. Choosing and running it was a marketing decision because the queue is where the relationship actually happens.
Interactive voice response: the menu that either gets a customer to the right person or teaches them to give up. It is a conversion funnel wearing a telecoms costume.
Automatic call distribution — matching the incoming contact to the agent who can actually resolve it, rather than to whoever is free.
Outbound campaigns integrated with the CRM base, so a call knew what the customer had already been sent and never opened with a question we had the answer to.
Requests, complaints and claims — peticiones, quejas y reclamos — as one workflow across the company, not one per department. This is the piece I would point at, because it is the least glamorous and the most structural.
Phone line, digital channels and the consumer service line feeding a single process rather than three parallel inboxes with three different definitions of 'resolved'.
A claim goes to whoever can close it. Organisational charts are not the customer's problem.
Every case with an owner and a state. Without that, 'we're looking into it' is the whole answer a company can give.
The complaint stream read as product and category insight — the loop most companies never close, because the data sits in a system marketing cannot see.
Owning PQR company-wide also meant owning the uncomfortable version of the truth. A marketing function that only sees the campaign metrics can believe its own story; one that also reads every complaint cannot.
Because the contact centre and the CRM base sat under the same function, an outbound campaign could be suppressed for a customer with an open claim, and a spike in complaints about a product could reach the brand team in days rather than in the next quarterly review.
That is the whole case for putting service inside marketing: not efficiency, but a shorter path between what a customer says and what the company does about it.
One intake, one owner per case, one record.
Complaints as the cheapest research you get, routed into quality.
Resolution as the metric, and a brand that survives the call.