Most brands are now waking up to the fact that superior customer service is one of the main factors that drive customers to spend more. Not only that, it helps you retain customers so you can attract repeat business from your existing fan base.
It is, however, unfortunate to still find many customer support teams work in silos. They function as their unit – moved away from product managers, designers, marketers, or other functions that can have a significant impact on overall customer experience.
Make Customer Service Part of Your Marketing Strategies:
Brands that have a good track record in offering excellent customer support always praised by their customers. Instead, they make customer service an integral part of their marketing strategies. They form integrated teams where customer support works together with marketing to create an exceptional customer experience.
As customer support staff interacts with tons of customers every day, they gain a wealth of precious marketing knowledge. At the same time, marketers bring in new resources, tools, and fresh ideas on how to better customer service experience.
If you are looking to bring your marketing and customer support teams together. Here are some tips to get you started.
Develop a Resource Base:
Customer support is continually dealing with angry/irritate customers who are struggling to fix some issues. Answering questions and fielding complaints is not an easy job when you are dealing with impatient clients.
Marketing can ease their job by developing a resource base to help customers find content appropriate for their needs. Many companies have developed robust micro-sites that help customers find remedies to their most common problems and answer the most frequently asked questions.
Customer support can identify common issues and concerns to help marketers to develop step-by-step instructions to provide solutions to customer problems.
Observe Social Media Platforms:
Customers now use social media platforms to reach out to your customer support, so you should consider offering the same on these channels. Many companies use Facebook Messenger to cover both marketing and customer service bases.
It is easily accomplished by connecting your Facebook business page to a Messenger chatbot. Using platforms like SendPulse, it is easy to create a chatbot as it doesn’t require any coding experience and it’s free.
However, you may not have customer service resources to dedicate to social media. In such cases, your marketing, which typically manages the social media sites, should respond to customers and place them in touch.
Create Customer Personas:
Customer support and marketing can benefit from creating customer personas. Both teams collect customer feedback and data. This information can be use to build profiles that help you define your audience.
Personas are very useful in helping the two departments work together. When customer service sees a higher call volume from a persona, marketing can pitch in and leverage a campaign explicitly tailored towards the customer’s needs.
Market Your Customer Service:
Customer service is increasingly becoming a differentiating factor in the marketplace. It is one of the prime reasons for a customer to choose your brand over the competition.
If you strive to provide phenomenal experience to all your consumers, your marketing must tout this trait. All your customer-facing material, such as company brochure and your website must cite your customer service and what makes it amazing.
Marketing must engage customer service representatives so they can understand the process to portray it accurately.
Identify Brand Advocates:
While most customer service contacts are made regarding complaints, there are instances where customers say positive things about their experience. They may speak highly of your products or use your offerings in a manner that would make a good case study. Customer service must pass such information to marketing.
Marketers love customers who offer testimonials since most customers trust online reviews. These testimonials can be include in presentations, emails, websites, and other promotional material. Marketers can describe the kind of customers. They want to connect with, and customer service can gather relevant information as they answer emails and take calls.
Create Digital Marketing Templates:
It is crucial to follow up after the customer has reached out to customer service. The response cannot end when the call finishes. Marketing can pitch in with appropriate digital marketing tips to create material that helps to engage the customer after their customer support call.
Customer service can work with marketing to create captivating digital marketing templates that can be used to communicate with the customer over email and social media as part of the follow-up to the customer support interaction.
In Conclusion:
It is crucial to have good collaboration between customer service and marketing. The teamwork between the two teams can improve your customer experience dramatically. They can use their knowledge to reinforce each other’s processes and tools. As they spend more time working together, they will find better ways of representing your brand positively to create interactions that customers will rave about.