A few days ago, marketing maven Seth Godin made a wonderful observation: An inbound phone call is the ultimate in short-term permission. The customer or prospect is taking the time to call you. (See Who Answers the Phone?)

Every marketer has been taught about contact points, where stakeholders’ paths, direct or indirect, intersect with those of the company. It can be a trucker asking for directions, or a dealer following up on an order, or a consumer with a complaint, or a shareholder with a query. It can be opening your package or looking you up in the yellow pages. It can be reaching you – or not – on the phone, via e-mail or in person, at the door. For marketers, each point of intersection is vindication, at least, that something is working, and a valuable opportunity to make that something (and the relationship if nothing else) work better.

Too many companies underestimate – and therefore, under-resource (in manpower and funding) customer service in all its various forms. Time is money but, when it concerns customer service, the money is seen as spent rather than earned, outbound rather than inbound.

I once had a bright employee who was asked to coordinate shipments during a period of tight supply. Since we had cleaned out most of our inventory, we were operating on a just-in-time or, as we put it, on an as-needed basis. To keep all this transparent to customers, we had to keep one step ahead of them, knowing what their needs were before they did. This required constant tracking and communications, a maximum of effort and empathy for a minimum of 12 hours a day. It was reputation-making stuff and, precisely for that reason, this employee had a request – that her title did not include the words Customer Service, which would have devalued her role dramatically. When and how, I wondered, did this unfortunate devolution of customer service begin?

Branding is ultimately about how people see your company, its products and/or services. Customer service is what you do at that critical moment when people get to see your company as it really is. The two are inextricably linked. Companies that spend a ton of marketing dollars to build the brand should remember this.