Marketing is the process of crafting the right message and using the right method to influence consumers and inspire them to try what your company has to offer. It is a way of letting people know why your business is different from the rest of the options in the market and what will they get out of choosing your products or services over others.
Customer service is the direct assistance or help which a business provides to the people who are interested in buying, have already purchased or those who have returned to invest again. It works with personal encounters, made over the phone, email or in person.
The department of marketing gets the customer to a business’s door, whereas the customer service team makes sure that they stay there. The former strives to bring more prospects, the latter makes every effort to nurture the current customer base.
Companies that do not take customer service seriously lose leads carried in by marketing, and have a difficult time retaining customers. Research dictates that the cost of customer acquisition is much more than customer retention. So, in a way, customer service backs marketing by saving money and making sure its strategies meet their set goal.
This post further shows how the two departments work well together and solidify profits for the business itself. Read on.
5 Ways Customer Support Strengthens Marketing
Relevant Content Ideas
Content is the ultimate tool, which marketers use to attract and educate customers, build a consistent following, add value to a business’s backstory and bring leads in an organic, cost-effective way. Regular content creation and posting is a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy.
However, coming up with the right content ideas that touch the audience’s pain-points is not an easy task. This is where customer service becomes important. Your company’s customer service representatives interact with all kinds of consumers daily. They have a repository of knowledge and a deeper insight into the wants and needs of your customers. They know what ticks people off, what issues they face in real life and how marketers can address those problems with the right content. Spectrum internet customer service is a great example here. If you head to its support page, you will find extremely relevant content pieces on internet outage, equipment troubleshooting, Wi-Fi improvement, which back the telecom company’s marketing efforts to a great extent.
So, reach out to your company’s customer service to gain inspiration for content ideas and then market the content to increase customer lifetime value.
Quicker Social Media Response
At present, there are approximately 3.5 billion people worldwide, who use social media daily. Any company that fails to see the importance of this platform does not stand a chance against its competitors and the new market trends. That is why you should make social media an elemental part of your marketing strategy, and not just that, your customer service too.
The marketing team can reel the social media users in with catchy graphics, meaningful content and the right ad placement. The customer service team can handle all the queries, requests and customer complaints in real-time. This collaboration is sure to create a more wholesome customer experience of the brand and prevent negative backlash on social media.
Realistic Alignment of Customer Expectations
Marketing is responsible for promoting your company’s message. Customer service is responsible for handling everything after the message is received. This message consists of promises, which set the expectations for the customers. If the expectations are clear, the customer experience is a beneficial one. However, if the expectations are unclear, the customer experience gets derailed and the brunt of misleading is borne by the customer service eventually.
So, to deliver well on your promises, align your company’s marketing team with customer service. The CSR will point out any inconsistencies in the expectations set by the marketers, who will then modify their campaigns along with a more realistic standard. For example, if the ads say that your pizza will be delivered within 10 minutes, and in reality, it takes longer than that, then you can be sure that the customers will complain. However, if the marketers modify the ad to 20 minutes and the pizza is delivered in the set timeframe, the customers will hold you true to your word and trust your business better.
Promotion & Campaign Reinforcement
Whatever promotions and campaigns your marketing team runs in a short-time scale to attract customers will gain an extra boost if the customer service is brought into the narrative, perhaps at the backend.
You see, the customer support phone number is the easiest to find on a business’s site. So, whenever people have any questions regarding the ad they saw on Facebook or about the timing of a scheduled webinar or how to enter the contest, they will surely reach out to a CSR.
If your customer service team is not updated with the marketing promotion, the agents will not be able to answer the customers’ questions or address their concerns efficiently. Not to mention the wastage of time going back and forth with the marketing department for the simplest queries, while a caller waits on hold! On the other hand, if the customer service is armored with the goings-on of marketing, the representatives will redirect customers to the campaign in the best way possible, and reinforce the other team’s efforts.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
One of the most interesting side effects of great customer service is that it creates solid brand evangelists. Customers who come back to business again and again after receiving stellar support the first time not only increase profits but they also bring along more prospects with them. It’s natural human behavior. When people get satisfied with something, they can’t stop raving about it to whoever can lend an ear to them, thus doing word-of-mouth marketing for your brand, on your behalf, just because you gave a wonderful customer service. This process strengthens the marketing team’s efforts, to say the least.
Wrapping Up
Customer service and Marketing, besides having different responsibilities, share the same goal, i.e. building a business’s customer base and ensuring revenue generation. This post shows you the ways you can use both to your utmost advantage.
