Internal customer surveys are a fantastic way to gauge how your department is faring in regards to the stakeholders you work for, in particular how a Marketing Operations shop is doing for their customers over in Marketing. There are not many relationships inside a company that can get as hostile as the operations versus marketing one. It actually makes sense why the two would not agree on many things. On one hand, you have marketing, a group of free, creative thinkers who believe many of their ideas are ground-breaking ones that need to get to market as soon as possible. On the other hand, the folks over in operations are more deliberate. They want to make sure the product enters the market under control and error free. So, what are some ways to make this relationship work better?

The first way to start would be to solicit feedback from one of the departments via any survey making site such as SurveyMonkey. The goal of the survey questions should be to determine how the operations team can serve the needs of marketing better, for example. I recently was involved in one of these types of surveys and found the chief concern of marketing was lack of communication from the operations side. This is not surprising since the marketing teams view their projects as their “babies” and they want extra care paid to it. Some easily solved solutions that were implemented were service level agreements around meeting minutes and meeting agendas. These types of fixes go a long way and are easy to implement however do not get to the root of the problem.

One situation where marketing and operations do not see eye to eye is that the operations team does not have the same feeling towards the project as marketing does. While marketing might think their project is the next best thing, the operations team just sees it as another design to complete, or another list pull. A recommendation might be for marketing to include operations in the early strategy meetings, so that the entire team is aware of why the project is important. A discussion around response rates and/or profit and loss estimates for the project would certainly enable the operations team to have more pride in their piece of the project, not to mention the quality of the work will likely increase. Keeping the entire team in the loop on project matters is essential in motivating members of the operations team of a project. Having a purpose is, in fact, a true motivator for all employees.

Another complaint from marketing in the survey was that the operations team got too bogged down into details, especially when interpreting a requirements document. Once again, the very nature of the employees in each department trigger why this argument takes place. The marketers think big picture while the operations team needs step by step, “in the weeds” documentation that covers every scenario of the project. In addition, the QA team needs requirements that tell them exactly how to test. In the survey I experienced, the most common specific complaint from operations was that the requirements to drill down to solicited external customers were too vague, or the requirements were ever-changing.

A recommendation to remedy the above situation is to have all components of the project approved before any operations work is to done. That is, the project must be approved by the legal and finance departments as well as an exact picture of who should be solicited needs to be ironed out. Marketing however, may find this task impossible since they just thought of this wonderful idea, it has not yet been totally scoped but they will get there as time goes on. At the same time, the operations team is happy to help marketing as they see the department as their own customers. However, operations people do not like making mistakes or having ambiguous requirements.

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