The clue is in the title - somewhere

Gone are the days when you could rely on a person’s job title to tell you what they do. Matt Henkes looks at some of the newfangled labels adorning business cards today, and asks what on earth they actually mean.

By Matt Henkes, staff writer

The role of the customer in modern business is constantly shifting. New perspectives, touchpoints, channels and retention strategies continue to enter the fray; great for anyone who enjoys working in a moving industry, and also nice for people who enjoy inventing exotic sounding job titles. But do they really mean anything to clients?

Fed up with what he felt was the divisive effect of numerous titles on his team’s morale, Matt Cardwell, former web marketing manager at the US finance firm Quicken Loans (QL), took an unusual approach by asking his team to come up with their own. With the support of the firm’s chief of marketing, traditional titles were discarded in favour of monikers such as 'mastermind of possibilities', and 'czar of the high fibre revolution'.

The organisation, number two in Fortune's recent top 100 companies to work for list, has always been pretty ambivalent about titles, says Cardwell, now officially 'idea salesman, energy focuser and people unleasher'.

It seems you can throw the words 'manager', 'analyst', 'modeller', 'director' or 'operative' into the mix with any one of a hundred business terms and you’ve created a new role. It’s not a gigantic leap from QL titles like 'royal storyteller & propaganda minister', to 'community evangelism manager', or 'customer insight director'.

But while it’s easy to mock, do these terms better reflect what it is these people do rather than labelling them with a bland, generic title? Here are some of the more unusual titles:

• Customer/community evangelism manager

All great brands try and build customers into evangelists – that is people who not only buy into the brand but actively espouse its virtues to their friends and family. Managing this process involves not only ensuring your firm has a deep relationship with its key customers and that the relationship is properly understood, it is also about making sure these stories are used effectively, inside and outside the organisation.

Daniel Hardy is the fictitious alias of a marketing professional who is reluctant to appear in an article that might, however subtly, poke fun at some of his peers. He believes these titles are often created within organisations to highlight an operational message, making a 'specialism' of a function that an efficient marketing operation should already perform.

"All employees of any truly customer-centric firm should be fostering customer or community evangelists at every point of contact," says Hardy. "An evangelism manager ensures that everyone is pulling in the same direction and spearheads that message."

Many new roles seem to fall into two categories: there are those that highlight an important facet of customer management and those that have come about as a result of advances in CRM reporting and tracking technology.

• Customer data miner

Like data? Love digging? Perhaps you should consider a move into data mining. Companies have been using computers to drill into sales data and analyse their market research for years, but is it wise to tag people in the field with a title more commonly associated with pickaxe-wielding pit workers?

"I don’t know whether the miner title will stick," says Hardy. "But while firms know this kind of data modelling has a positive effect on the bottom line, the role will continue to be important."

A data miner will be able to extract the meaningful information from massive sets of data that goes beyond simple analysis, converting raw data into information, knowledge and insight. They will be able to devise new ways of querying data, identifying trends and reporting on campaign successes.

Unsurprisingly, your miner will also need a high level of market research skills, complex database and reporting software knowledge, and finely-honed analytical abilities.

• Interaction associate

Industry has an unerring knack of coming up with great titles for people who operate on the coal face, and the world of customer management is no exception. Also known as customer facilitators or assistance operatives, but more commonly called contact centre staff, these individuals are vital to any firm that deals directly with a large number of customers.

With proper training and advanced communication skills, they can often make a marked difference to a firm’s ability to court its customers on the phone.

• Customer insight manager

Closely related to the data miner (and utilising many of the same functions), an insight manager should bring you closer to your customers through analysis of all available information. "This is seen an important area of development in industry," says Hardy. "Business insight is taken seriously."

The perfect customer insight manager will be able to tell you how likely it is that a particular customer will respond to a mailout on a Tuesday, when it’s raining and they’re wearing Y-fronts instead of boxers.

When all this insight is fed into your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to optimise every touch point from the customer’s view. Without an insight manager, where would these insights come from? If you know what they’re going to do next, you can plan accordingly.

• Customer information planning manager

Managing the planning of customer information is imperative to the effective functioning of any organisation. Working with the heads of customer strategy, your customer information planning manager will liaise with your data miners, information analysts and insight modellers to identify customer needs, behaviours and attitudes in order to maximise your strategic marketing effectiveness.

"I think some of these will overlap in places," says Hardy. "But personally, I don’t think you should attribute to much importance to what someone is called."

Chartered Institute of Marketing representative Ray Jones is reluctant to comment directly on any of the newfangled titles, but agrees with Hardy on this point. "There’s no substitute for responsible marketing," he says. "Sure it’s good to put a clever title in there to raise a point but at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for solid research and accepted practice, whatever you want to call it."