How to Combine Marketing + Customer Service Strategy
5 Min. Read
Customer success is the focal area for both growing and established businesses. Customer success goes beyond customer satisfaction and user experience by placing customers at the heart of the organization. So, if you are committed to customer success, all your activities and processes must be aligned to help your customers achieve their objectives seamlessly, but first you need to understand your customers and what they want to achieve (Conversific is great for this).
Once you have done your customer analysis then its time to break down the organizational siloes to implement a strategy that promotes cross-departmental collaboration. It especially holds true for marketing and customer service – two traditionally separate functions that must be unified (sMarketing) in the present times for customer success.
Take the example of social media. Modern consumers have the option of contacting businesses on social media in addition to traditional contact methods. They also share their opinions and interactions on social media and other public forums, impacting what other users think of their brand. In this way, customer service and marketing get intrinsically tied up.
Stats indicate that up to 95% of users are likely to share a bad customer service experience with others. We also know that user reviews contribute significantly to a brand’s reputation. Therefore, it is no surprise that a unified marketing and customer service strategy is the need of the hour for any business that wishes to grow.
Table of Contents
How to Combine Marketing + Customer Service Strategy
Invest in Real-Time Customer Service
Speedy and reliable customer service will go a long way in building your brand’s reputation. By integrating live chat software on your site and social media pages, you can meet these two requirements and minimize negative comments by handling user queries and concerns in real-time. Live chat also acts as a marketing tool by enabling your customer service reps to provide more personalized services. For example, if a customer cannot find something on your site, a live agent can guide them around and help them find what they are looking for. A live agent can also tell visitors about the benefits of the product or service they are interested in, share customized offers, and even help fill out lengthy forms during the checkout process with the cobrowsing facility. Besides texting and cobrowsing, modern live chat software enables video and audio calling so that your users can choose the most convenient option according to their requirements. Such software also saves user conversations that can be used for generating ideas for future marketing campaigns.
If you are wondering whether live chat also helps you meet your marketing goals, here are some stats that will amaze you:
- CrazyEgg found 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from a site that offers live chat support.
- Live chat drives repeat traffic, with 63% of customers more likely to return to a website that offers live chat, according to Emarketer.
- Live chat also impacts your company’s bottom-line. Forrester found that the average order value increases by 10% when customers engage in a conversation before making a purchase.
- An AMA report also adds that live chat can increase your company’s market awareness at various stages of the customer journey.
Content Creation Ideas
Successful marketers know the power of regular and consistent content creation. However, the content must also be relevant. Yet, it isn’t easy to churn out hundreds of content ideas without knowing what your audience is looking for, or struggling with.
But what if customer service and marketing are unified?
Your customer service team is continually in touch with your existing and prospective customers. Therefore, they are well-acquainted with their queries, concerns, and pain points, which can be used to write thoughtful content for users by the marketing team.
Unified Brand Messaging
Customers don’t see your company in siloes. So, if Joe sees an offer on a popular course you are running, he is likely to call up support to get more details because he sees your brand as one; he does not divide it into multiple teams.
But what if your teams know nothing about the ongoing course or offer that your marketing team is promoting? More chances are that Joe is going to consider your promotion to be fake and will perhaps inform others of his experience as well.
Aligning your marketing and customer services teams can avoid such situations from happening. Your customer service team must know about the promotions that your marketing team is running to answer visitor queries confidently.
One idea is to keep a shared document where the support team can access the links to various promotions and answers to frequently asked questions about them. This prevents confusion and saves time for both your customer reps and prospective customers, who might have to wait on call until the representative gets clarity on the subject from someone in the marketing team.
Leveraging User Generated Content for Marketing
Customer issues are not the only topics that your support team may share with your marketing. The support team is most often the best equipped to identify customer success stories that can be passed to create case studies or seek testimonials for marketing.
The support team can also share feedback to build customer loyalty programs and then appraise the prospects of these programs to boost conversion rates.
Final Thoughts
A unified marketing and customer service strategy will help you create and promote a unified brand image. In turn, this will ensure both your existing and prospective customers have the same level of experience on all your touchpoints, which builds trust and adds to your customer satisfaction.
Besides, a unified customer service and marketing strategy make it easier to meet customer expectations in a digitally connected world. With most users preferring live chat to engage with firms, your customer service reps automatically become your brand ambassadors, which makes their contributions and inputs invaluable for the success of your future marketing campaigns.
To get started, you can integrate live chat for customer service on all your touchpoints. This will improve support and help you analyze user behavior to generate new content and marketing ideas.
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