Marketing and customer service seem to operate in completely different spheres, but ultimately they have very similar goals. In fact, customer service is becoming one of the most important aspects of a company’s decision-making process. Although this is beyond the control of marketers, companies are beginning to recognize the importance of merging their efforts with customer service to achieve this goal.
It is important that the customer service team stays informed of the positioning tactics employed by the marketing team to help the company succeed and rise above competition. Customer service is working to differentiate your business from its competitors and to convince customers to return in the future. If you are able to improve your loyalty strategy by using your marketing at every touch point, you will have an easier time holding your profits together.
Brand Reputation
Brand Reputation
Outsourced customer service interactions are no longer ideal as clear, accessible, and immediate communication is needed to support a business. Today’s consumers are raising the bar for businesses when it comes to the type of interaction they have with brands. Now, consumers are demanding more from brands and look for companies that have a proven track record of providing high-quality customer service. Therefore, it is an essential aspect of any marketing method to acquire a reputation for excellent customer service. Customer service plays an important role in distinguishing your business or brand from your competitors.
Customer Acquisition
Customer Acquisition
When you’re working to align your brand’s marketing efforts with your customer service team, remember that brands spend 6-7 times more to attract new customers than to retain their existing ones. This shows how important it is to have a customer service team to support the efforts of your marketing team. While your marketing team focuses on pushing customers down the funnel, your customer service team works hard to keep them. If you look at all the departments in your company and which customers interact with you the most, you are likely to come across customer service. Remember that it is not just the number of customers that is important, but the quality of service and level of commitment is also equally important.
Buyer Persona
Buyer Persona
You may learn over time that you don’t understand your customers as well as you think, and you may need to do a little research to see how well you really understand the personality of the buyer. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customers, and it suggests how they think and behave. It will serve as a guide for how your company can interact with them. The great thing is that your customer service team can talk directly to your customers, which means they probably know more about them than any other department in your business. You can offer a richer closed loop to analyze where customers spend time on your site and what they do.
Your buyer persona can also help you shape your communication strategy. You can learn by making sure you hear the feedback from customers. Connecting with customers is one of the most effective steps, especially when the marketing team implements a strategy that clearly defines the persona of your customers and your target audience. You will understand this better than anyone on your team, and it will be your customer service efforts that will put these concepts into practice.
Since understanding buyer persona is critical to developing effective marketing campaigns, it is important that marketers work more closely with the team to help them truly understand the needs and thoughts of customers. Marketers should attend customer team meetings to get a better insight into the person they are marketing to. It is much smoother when leads have clear expectations, and that is when leaders have a better understanding of how your company’s products and services help the customers.
Customer Expectations
Customer Expectations
Marketing initiatives entice customers with the promise of high-quality services and set the tone for product expectations. If your customer service team is unable to deliver on your brand’s promises and expectations, disaster can strike once your team starts setting up key customer contact points. Remember that your customer service department must ensure that it always meets or even exceeds customer expectations.
This is what ultimately delivers the high-quality services that your marketing department provides and sells to consumers. This attitude is particularly important because it affects the impact your marketing team has on strengthening the value of your brand. Always think of your customer service team as your last internal representative, not the last line of defense for your business. You have a customer service department that ensures that you hear the customer’s feedback and share the appropriate response with the customer.
Consistent Messaging
Consistent Messaging
It is critical that you always provide your customers with an experience that stays true to your brand’s marketing message. It is also important to ensure that your external messages are adapted to changing customer preferences and requirements. Open communication between departments is essential to keep the brand message in view. Your customer service department must maintain a constant dialogue with your marketing department to ensure that customer feedback is heard and taken into account. Your customer service department should act as an extension of your marketing department and have a direct impact on how your marketers want to address and interact with the customers.
Effective Communication
Effective Communication
Most companies can engage with their customers via social media or talk to them about a topic via videos. Marketers use social media to offer services to their customers, connect with their audience, or simply promote content. When the two work together, your marketing department is the one that publishes content, and customer service directs customers to you. But are your marketing team and social media manager really responsible for solving customer service problems? Customer service teams receive a lot of praise for their ability to help customers and solve problems, which means that they are good people for their job.
This is all the more important as consumers increasingly use social media as a means of communication with businesses. In fact, for most customers, the preferred way to contact a brand is via live chat, email, or phone. But why would you want to offer your customers an average customer service experience by keeping social media management exclusively for your marketing team? If you make it clear that your company’s social media account management is a function of the marketing team, it means that employees from other departments cannot be involved. Fortunately, marketers have the ability to ensure that communication reaches the most appropriate person.
Marketers can work with customer service teams to forward customer-related questions to the team, making communication more timely and accurate. The role of customer service and marketing is also to ensure that the channels of communication with your customers are always open and transparent. Developing a system that allows members of the customer service team to participate and answering queries on social media will only lead to better customer experience. Your customer service team will be able to notify your marketers of any changes or features when they occur.
Marketers will be able to understand more about what consumers are looking for and how their preferences and requirements change day by day. Building on this last point, listening to your customers and building great customer service is a strategy that is emerging based on the idea of making good use of customer complaints. Use valuable feedback to constantly improve.
Social Media Presence
Social Media Presence
One of the less traditional ways in which customer service and marketing can work together is to use social media, a common tool for teams working in the service and marketing industries. While marketing and customer care teams need to work together in this way, it is up to you to determine which responsible people are designated so that your marketing and customer care teams can use social media to achieve their goals.
Content Creation
Content Creation
Successful marketers understand how important regular and consistent content creation is to their marketing strategy. Unfortunately, this means that marketers also need a steady flow of ideas to create content. Even the most experienced content creators can sometimes struggle to develop a consistent stream of content that customers and other stakeholders consider valuable.
Marketers try to create content that helps solve their audience’s problems. When people are constantly communicating with customers and learning about their problems, interests, and needs, your team has access to an untapped bonanza of viable ideas. The customer service team can also offer your marketing team real success stories that can be used in their content, which is always an added bonus. Marketing alignment allows your marketing team to find customers who are creating excellent case studies more easily, so they are able to consider them as specific examples of customer success, and both teams know your preferences in advance.
Open your channel to your customer service team, not only for their expertise but also for the needs of your audience. This will help to avoid marketing promoting product features that are not used or unsatisfactory for your customers. Your customer service department should act as an extension of your marketing department in the way marketers hope to reach and interact with customers and vice versa.
Communicate what content you think is most helpful to your customers and prospects or the kind of content that addresses their problems, such as how to best use a new social network platform or how to use a specific software tool. One way to do this is to create a space or page for customers to share their experiences so you can create better engagement.
Collaboration
Collaboration
Your overall marketing strategy should encourage collaboration between departments, and that’s what you get when you integrate customer service into your marketing strategies. This helps to ensure that the two aspects of customer service and marketing work together. Your digital marketing team needs to coordinate with both your sales and customer service teams to bring quality to the customer’s experience. Customer service can work with marketing to create engaging digital marketing templates that can be used to communicate with customers.
Unifying Teams
Unifying Teams
Integrating the role of customer service with marketing will ensure that customers receive good service and have a pleasant experience with your business from the beginning of a relationship. A strategy for good customer relationship management involves increasing leads and improving customer service through a combination of processes, actions, and technology. To provide high-touch service to all, you shouldn’t operate as an isolated department. Marketing and customer support can work together to create a more consistent customer experience.
By connecting with other departments such as marketing, sales, and development teams, it is possible to increase efficiency, save time for others, and provide holistic customer service. Customer service must be tied to all business areas that interact with your customers, including marketing, sales, product development, and sales management. In this model, everyone works together to create the best possible customer experience.
To learn the best strategies to align your teams, seek the experts at Universal Creative Solutions. We’ve worked with companies struggling to optimize their potential and helped them bring their teams together to achieve higher ROI, better customer relationships, and exponential business growth. Contact us today to learn more.
