Customer Management Practice

The Customer Management Practice (CMP) was built around a simple premise: customer experience is a business discipline, not a soft skill, and the companies that treat it as such win. As CMP experienced rapid growth, its visibility hadn’t kept pace. The brand needed to sharpen its position in a crowded market, establish its expanding research division as an authoritative industry voice, and elevate Customer Contact Week (CCW), the world’s largest customer contact event series, with greater media attention, marquee keynote speakers, and a social media presence worthy of the industry’s premier gathering.

CMP selected The Pollack Group (TPG) as its agency of record to build the messaging, tell the story, and unify public relations, executive thought leadership, influencer relations, social media, and events under a single integrated communications strategy.

The Challenge

CMP set out to find an agency that could leverage its PR, social media presence, and influencer relations to attract new audiences in the customer service vertical and raise brand awareness. TPG was tasked with growing organic social media followers, obtaining earned media coverage in top-tier outlets, and identifying relevant influencers to attend CMP’s flagship event, Customer Contact Week, in Las Vegas. In a highly saturated market, CMP was vocal about the brand’s goal of establishing itself as a trusted market company, backed by vetted research and industry intelligence. Rather than treating PR, social media, and influencer relations as separate entities, CMP chose TPG, an integrated marketing agency, to ensure all disciplines reinforced the same cohesive message.

Building the Message

Before pursuing a single placement, TPG focused on building the message. The team conducted an extensive audit of CMP’s competitors, identifying industry positioning, key media relationships, audience behavior, and whitespace opportunities across the customer experience landscape. Using those insights, TPG developed a developed a message matrix that translated industry pain points and audience priorities into a narrative executives could consistently use across interviews, thought leadership, internal communications, press releases, and social media.

At the same time, TPG developed dedicated strategies for both CMP and CCW, including social media audits, editorial calendars, influencer outreach, and content planning to reinforce the same messaging across all channels.

Driving the Story

CMP’s expertise touched nearly every industry, and TPG treated that breadth as an opportunity to drive the story. Through disciplined real-time news monitoring and rapid response, the agency consistently connected CMP’s expertise to the conversations already shaping the business landscape.

Newsjacking became a daily discipline. When AMC announced variable movie ticket pricing based on seat location, CMP President Mario Matulich provided commentary on the customer implications of the decision, resulting in coverage in MarketWatch. Similar rapid-response opportunities consistently inserted CMP into national conversations surrounding customer loyalty, consumer expectations, and customer service.

Simultaneously, TPG elevated Mario Matulich as a recognized thought leader, securing interviews, expert commentary, and bylined articles across outlets including MarketWatch, USA Today, The Washington Post, Forbes, BankBeat, and in a variety of CX trade outlets. TPG also developed Nicole Kyle into a second authoritative spokesperson, leveraging CMP Research’s data-driven insights to secure additional coverage in Business Insider and Forbes.

Elevating Customer Contact Week

TPG applied a dedicated communications strategy to CCW, transforming the conference into an event that generated attention well beyond the convention floor. The agency secured coverage highlighting CMP Research findings in Forbes and Newsbreak, arranged interviews with The Business Journals, and generated feature coverage surrounding CCWomen and industry workforce trends. When CMP challenged the agency to secure a household-name CEO for the CCW stage, TPG delivered David Glickman, Founder and CEO of Mint Mobile, alongside Bridget Teeter, Vice President of Customer Experience at Lemonade, adding marquee credibility that attracted both attendees and media.

Building the Conversation Online

With the message architecture firmly in place, TPG extended the same strategic narrative across CMP’s social channels. Rather than treating social media as an afterthought to PR, every post, video, interview, and event activation reinforced the same story and brand position.

The agency rebuilt CMP’s social channels through profile optimization, platform-specific content creation, editorial planning, and consistent publishing schedules. At CCW, influencer partnerships, live content creation, speaker interviews, and event coverage amplified the conference experience while introducing CMP to new audiences. Rather than operating separately, PR, influencer marketing, and social media reinforced one another to maximize visibility before, during, and after each event.

Results

The results tell only part of the story. More importantly, CMP now owns a position in the market that extends beyond media coverage. By building the message first and ensuring every communications channel reinforced it, The Pollack Group helped transform CMP into an industry authority with the visibility, credibility, and influence to match its expertise. The impact was measurable across every communications channel:

Earned Media

• 3,335 earned media placements in 12 months
• 94.8% year-over-year increase in coverage
• 3.85 billion earned impressions
• $35.6 million in advertising value equivalency (AVE)
• Coverage in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Forbes, MarketWatch, and CNBC

Social Media

• 40% increase in followers
• 57% increase in engagement
• 61% LinkedIn follower growth over a 15-month period
• $524,400 in advertising value generated across three Customer Contact Week events

This integrated approach transformed CMP from a rapidly growing organization into a recognized industry authority, with the media presence, executive credibility, digital engagement, and marquee event programming to prove it.