The Link Between Customer Service and Marketing
Customer services and marketing might seem like two very different roles within a business, but there is actually considerable overlap in what they do. By considering your customer services and marketing as a single unified entity, you can use both of them much more effectively. Read on as we explain more.
Customer Support Via Social Media
A growing number of consumers are using social media profiles to reach out to the businesses that they use. For businesses who maintain an active presence on social media, this instant and direct communication with their customers can be incredibly valuable. Conventional methods of providing customer support can often seem slow and outdated by today’s standards. Consumers want things instantly, and they don’t expect to have to wait around for a response when they have a problem with your products or services.
Providing your customers with prompt and comprehensive customer support will serve as an important marketing exercise in its own right. Even if a customer has an initially negative experience of your business, good customer support can rapidly turn that, and their opinion of you, 180 degrees.
Use Customer Feedback to Shape Future Content
Feedback from your customers will provide you with valuable data that you can use to shape the direction of future content. Whether customers want to give you positive or negative feedback, you should make it as easy as possible for them to do so. The easier it is for customers to communicate their issues to you, the easier it is for you to resolve them, and the less likely they are to become a barrier to them continuing to use your business.
On the other hand, positive feedback from your customers can let you know where you are going right with your current approach and which aspects you should stick with and which should reconfigure. Even if you disagree with the feedback you receive from your customers, you should still make a note of it and take it on-board. If you find that the sentiments of one customer are not an outlier, but actually representative of how many of your patrons are feeling, then you can act on issues that would otherwise have flown under your radar.
If you want to use your customer feedback to your advantage, you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to give you their feedback. This requires the use of good help desk software such as Zendesk and Freshdesk. In one of their articles, PieSync have analyzed both tools, which are among the most popular help desk offerings on the market, to help you decide which is best for you. In fact, the PieSync blog contains a lot of useful resources for marketers.
Unify Your Messaging
Unified messaging throughout your business will augment the impact of your marketing. If a potential customer or another business sees your marketing materials and has any questions or queries about it, they will usually turn to your customer support. They might head your social media page and send a message there. But as we discussed earlier, this is functionally the same as reaching out to your customer support.
By having your customer support and marketing teams working closely together, you can ensure that any customers who do reach out to your support staff are greeted with the same coherent message that is consistent with your messaging.
For a modern business, customer support should be thought of as another arm of the marketing department. Both customer support and your marketers are striving to prove to consumers that your business is the right choice for them. By having them work together, you can make both more effective than they would be individual.
