Businesses have long used customer service and marketing to gain new clients while keeping existing ones happy. Market research and advertising combine to assist companies with marketing their services. In contrast, advertising guides existing users who may already have purchased goods or services brands offer.
But these days, marketing and customer service are joining forces to help brands attract more attention, boost sales and assist their consumers. Here, we explore the benefits of pairing customer service and marketing together, along with interactions between the two and best ways to integrate customer service into a marketing plan through this blog post.
What Effect Does Customer Service Have On Marketing?
Research conducted by PwC found that 88% of consumers consider online customer reviews when making purchasing decisions, so 88% is an impressive number that should make your service shine with potential clients online. Furthermore, according to this research, 39% would discontinue transactions if their experience with you was negative - something many businesses neglect doing until there's one bad service experience with one particular vendor or service.
What is customer service in marketing? Customer service has become essential when making business investment decisions; therefore, its importance cannot be undermined any longer. Customer service has become an indispensable element of marketing that can dramatically shape brand images and, when mishandled, undermine marketing initiatives simultaneously. Therefore, customer service plays a pivotal role in effective promotion strategies.
Customer Service's Role In Marketing
Existing and prospective customers begin forming expectations when they make initial contact with a company, so customer service is integral to marketing. Customers need to perceive benefits, whether promises made to them by companies or experiences gained first-hand; prospective customers may hold some preconceptions while existing ones expect exceptional service at all times.
Customer service role in marketing are essential in providing assurances and reassurances to prospective and existing customers alike, regardless of marketing strategies being employed by businesses. If customers perceive that services provided to them are subpar, even the best of marketing campaigns could fail due to perceptions formed based on this interaction - perceptions which will determine their attraction or lack thereof towards an organization, with subsequent customers spreading the word of any poor experiences to others they know of.
The Significance Of Collaboration Between Marketing And Customer Service
Enhance Cross-Team Collaboration
Recognize that, aside from delighted customers, happy employees also act as advocates in the market. Engaged employees may improve customer relations, resulting in 20% more sales growth. But where should you begin when building both customer service and marketing teams? We suggest an open dialogue to explore customer service and marketing alignment first. Not only will this increase engagement between teams, but it may also encourage greater cooperation from each side.
Doing this can help your organization avoid situations in which the customer support team is left waiting on the marketing team for leads while the marketing team loses opportunities due to subpar customer support services.
Create Outstanding Customer Service Experiences
As well as working together to facilitate better collaboration between marketing and customer service teams, collaborating also serves another vital purpose - offering seamless customer experiences for their customers. Here, we explore ways your teams can come together to produce better experiences for your customer base.
Identify Your Ideal Buyer Persona: Your customer service staff should understand who and how your brand targets buyer personas. Both teams should work towards creating the appropriate buyer personas for the company. Marketing staff may use tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics to conduct comprehensive audience research on existing customers as well as social audiences such as Age, Language, Location, Interests, Challenges, Stage of Life.
Increase Revenue
One benefit of working together between marketing and customer service teams is seeing your revenue skyrocket. Customer service teams can connect and educate prospective buyers to understand why your brand can solve their challenges; marketing departments can introduce potential prospects more closely while informing them what new offerings they should check out by employing effective strategies across platforms.
Due to their efforts, you'll gain new customers and retain existing ones who could return for future purchases. Thanks to them, more loyal customers who will serve as brand promoters may emerge while drawing in even more customers to your business.
Five Ways Marketing And Customer Service Can Cooperate
Once you understand why customer service and marketing strategies must work harmoniously, the next step should be identifying their results. You will soon see how combining marketing with customer service strategies can yield better returns for your brand. Let's dive in.
Brainstorm Content Creation Ideas Now
Once marketing and customer service teams collaborate on content creation ideas, you may see changes in them. Teams may identify knowledge gaps by keeping an account of:
- What keywords were visitors using to access relevant self-help articles in our knowledge repository?
- Which pieces have the competitor websites covered, and how much engagement have those articles garnered?
Chat allows both teams to use chat transcripts to identify frequent challenges, allowing them to create canned responses that reduce response times and enable faster resolution of issues. If your live chat integrates with knowledge bases, creating help center articles becomes effortless within its widget interface.
Recognize that customer service should not simply serve as a marketing strategy here. Instead, this strategy will assist the customer service department in reducing complaints while helping marketing teams understand if the content they're developing targets the appropriate demographic.
Recognize Opportunities For Upselling & Cross-Selling
Marketing and customer service teams work together to cross-sell and upsell, ultimately increasing revenues. Customer service agents usually do this proactively during conversations with one of your customers. But the question arises here: is your marketing team helping your business upsell and cross-sell products effectively?
Customer Service Teams differ significantly because they attempt to convince prospects in real-time to increase order value or add items to carts. At the same time, Marketing Teams use social media marketing and customer service strategies to encourage people and add combinations or upgrade plans accordingly.
Create A Unified Brand Messaging Strategy
Brand messaging provides customers with an opportunity to gauge whether or not they understand a company's ideology; otherwise, they might leave your product or service for one that resonates more with them - prompting your marketing team to create cohesive brand messaging customers can identify with to keep customers loyal to your product/service and decrease customer churn. In this situation, it becomes vitally important that they work on creating messaging customers can identify with while remaining competitive against rival businesses in line. To develop such messages, it requires:
- Customer experience management solutions: Indicating key concerns and hurdles.
- What factors motivate customers to return to a brand?
- Are the marketing initiatives helping your organization capture the right target audiences' interest?
Implement Effective Customer Loyalty Programs
A practical brainstorming session between customer service and marketing teams can solve a wide variety of marketing problems - one being how to promote loyalty programs among customers. As much as it's essential to create an inviting loyalty program for customers to sign up for, customer service promotion strategies can support it by helping to prevent disloyalty from dropping out prematurely.
Establish Realistic Customer Expectations
Does customer service impact marketing team initiatives in another way? Your customer service team can also aid your marketing team in setting customer expectations from day one. However, this might sound impossible at first. Let us show you.
Customer service operators encounter many instances where customers have misguided or unrealistic expectations from a brand. When these expectations aren't fulfilled, this often results in disappointment. Customer service staff should communicate these inaccurate expectations to marketers, who can use this data to adjust their strategies accordingly.
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Conclusion
Outsourced customer service quickly evolved into an essential marketing strategy for our businesses even before we realized it due to customer expectations shifting away from factors like price towards experiences associated with products.
Working together, both teams can modify existing marketing strategies in ways that set reasonable customer expectations, create unification in brand messaging and identify upsell opportunities - not to mention identify and develop content strategies to close any knowledge gaps among them both.
