Customer Service is the Best Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Many companies already invest in assessing phone and email communications of their executives with customers and provide them trainings for improvement, if need be. To let your customer service executives make your customers feel valued, you need to first help them feel cared for. Certain aspects of customer experience, that are more process-driven, can be well automated, increasing the speed and efficiency of service. For example, a chatbot for customer support can help your customers with basic FAQs or with demo or instructions on how to use a product, or solve basic complaints if programmed for the same. Zappos is one example of how a business can truly build a connect with its customers. Its CEO, Tony Hsieh, replies to each mail or message personally, and there are many stories that show how the company has been valuing its customers.

One of the biggest mistakes you can do as a marketer is to overlook the importance of customer service. This happens as we get “too focused” on the “important” aspects of marketing. The service rep should have the history of the customer’s communication, so the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves and the rep can provide better, more personalized service. If you support your customers when times are difficult, it’s highly likely they’ll stick with you for the long term. Josh is the Content and Community Manager at Fieldboom, which provides an all-in-one lead capture and customer feedback solution to help with growing your business faster.

As per stats, 86% of existing customers discontinue interactions with businesses because of their negative experiences. 90 percent of customers will spend more with companies that personalize the customer service they offer them. Customer service is an umbrella term for all interactions that enhance customer experience and help improve their relationship with the company. Make sure you’re easy to reach by providing multiple ways for customers to contact you.

It represents the total amount of money a customer is likely to spend with your business over the course of their lifetime. And while there are many factors that can impact CLV, one of the most important is customer service. Considering that customers are the very reason that companies exist, it is strange that their value is so under-utilized.

If there is no alignment between these two departments, customers will get something that doesn’t match their expectations. Marketing is the outbound face of your organization, and your customers interact with their activities and campaigns multiple times for a while before converting. ChatGPT and Google Bard provide similar services but work in different ways.

The concept that “the customer is always right” is not meant to be understood word by word. Shopping with Zappos guarantees an easy and painless return or exchange process and expedited delivery. Additionally, their customer support line is always ready to help – 24/7 – staffed by friendly and knowledgeable representatives.

Building customer trust and relationships

The more customer service help they receive, the less likely they are to defect to the competition. When the bonds between customers and brands are strong, your teams can even make a mistake or two and still keep the customer. Be sure to keep tabs on changes in the marketplace and your competitors so that your customer service and marketing teams can make adjustments as necessary.

Another negative byproduct of siloed teams is that either one can quickly become complacent if the other seemingly isn’t pulling their weight. The team that feels slighted will stop caring about whether or not they accomplish their goals at all. Mat suggests scheduling meetings and training sessions that involve — and solicit input from — both marketing and service teams. During these sessions, members of each team can pick each others’ brains to learn more about which strategies are (or aren’t) working and gain insight into why this might be. On the other hand, providing a poor experience to your customers can be incredibly detrimental to your business. Although agents often work one-on-one with customers, they still need a sense of professional support and camaraderie.

Aligning your teams ensures all involved parties stay in the loop regarding individual customers’ experiences with the organization. Both marketing and support teams will know what’s already been discussed with a given customer, as well as what the customer expects to happen next. Not only does this result in less repetition and back-and-forth, it also ensures no steps are skipped during the process of onboarding and providing service to your customers. Traditionally, marketing and customer service teams have little — if anything — to do with one another. Great customer service is critical to the success of any business, especially in the context of growth marketing.

The company is home to an iconic portfolio of seven kitchenware brands including Corelle, Pyrex, Instant Pot and more. Managing customer service for such a diverse range of beloved business units demands continual innovation driven by consumer insights. To achieve this, Instant Brands has embraced a top-notch approach to social media customer service. According to a recent study from Booz & Company, 75% of marketers using social media identify customer service as a primary use of their social media platform.

Today, businesses operate in a more dynamic and disruptive environment than ever, with customers exposed to multiple options and choices in almost every domain. With social media being a central playing ground for prospects and customers, bad news gets around faster than ever. On the flip side, satisfied customers do tend to act as loyal advocates of the brand on social media. Customer service experience is the overall experience of a customer based on interaction with a company’s sales, support and service teams before, during and after a purchase.

If anything, they come up with interesting social media marketing and customer service strategies to encourage people and add product combinations or even upgrade to a premium version of a certain plan. A brainstorm between the marketing and customer success teams could bring about a loyalty program that customers are clamoring to join — without creating too much of a heavy lift for the marketers. Keep reading to learn the ten ways marketing and customer service can work together to achieve mutual goals and solve for the customer every step of the way. In any business, customer service and marketing should have a harmonious relationship.

And there’s no sweeter harmony than what’s created through collaboration between customer service and marketing. Your business can use the features of live chat to understand customers’ pain points and provide the help that aligns with their expectations, which improves customer experience. Like marketing, social media helps to increase your brand engagement and gain new customers.

Lack of alignment between teams can cause friction in terms of the customer’s expectations, leading to frustration and disappointment. For example, if a company’s marketing team promotes the idea that the company provides x, y, and z services — but the support team only offers x _and _y — its customers will understandably be let down. They may tell others about the positive experience they https://chat.openai.com/ had with your brand, leave positive reviews, or even actively promote your brand on social media. To truly benefit from it, you need to use that feedback to inform your marketing strategy. That might mean making changes to your product or service offerings, improving your customer support processes, or even adjusting your branding and messaging to better align with your customers’ needs.

Once teams are looking at a shared goal, all the work that goes into getting there makes a lot more sense. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots have evolved significantly that can help you automate various business processes. This shows how your team will always need the support of the right tools and technologies to get better at their job. With such engagement results, it’ll become easier for your business to give your employees workplace satisfaction and motivate them to do better going forward.

The role of customer service in managing brand reputation

IKEA for example values the customer-first purpose and has an excellent customer-first business plan. Its U.S. 5,000 Dreams campaign is working in partnership with three refugee organizations. It has supported its local communities by donating 5,000 beds and bedding to refugee families who are starting new lives in America.

It is a value or experience your customers can expect to receive every time they interact with your company. This is an important part of customer experience/ delight and builds strong brand loyalty. More than 75% of buying decisions are based on reviews, and customers talk about a bad experience much more than you think. Thanks to social media, one bad review can quickly escalate into a crisis that is impossible to handle. These challenges can harm the company, so marketing and customer service must work together to avoid them. By tracking these metrics and continuously improving your customer service, you’ll be able to deliver outstanding customer service and drive business success.

At Magnolia—the retail and experience empire built by HGTV favorites Chip and Joanna Gaines—number of tickets solved or time to resolution are not brand-right or even accurate indicators of success. You didn’t, something didn’t work out as expected, and you contacted customer support. A skilled, helpful customer support agent helped diagnose the problem, explaining that not checking that box was the issue. “Without our support team, it would be extremely difficult to operate as a company,” says Meg.

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a pretty important metric when you’re running a business. CLV represents the total revenue you can expect from a single customer account. Growing this value means your customers shop more frequently or spend more money at your business. You should be able to convey your message in a brand-friendly manner that makes it easy for the customer to reach out and listen actively to solutions.

Direct client engagement is critical for most retailers to ensure buyer satisfaction and loyalty. Even though automated self-service technologies are now widely employed, many firms recognize the importance of giving clients the option of speaking with a natural person. Customer support could look very different depending on your business, industry, and who your customers are. But for customer support professionals like Palazzolo, it’s ultimately about being helpful. Insights from employees, product experts, and external partners will be key for creating help center articles and addressing common customer inquiries. They’re also helpful to agents as a reference point when they’re assisting customers.

You can also offer loyalty rewards for customers who continue to do business with you. But the brands that are successful in offering customer support say no to these silos. Instead, they have an integrated team where support works hand-in-hand with marketers to improve the overall customer experience.

If they are not taken care of holistically by a business, they have every right to turn down any of their attempts at sales and marketing. Customers today are more discerning than ever, which means they want to know everything about what an organization has to offer and how they go about providing it. This means portraying a 360-degree view of the company to everyone — customers who did business with the organization in the past, present, and prospective customers. If you are a business owner, you are trying to tell the world what you have to offer (your product) and how it will benefit people. Marketing attracts potential clients, and if they like what you have to offer, they eventually pay you to own/use your product — thus becoming your customers. They worked on changing their existing marketing strategy to highlight these key points.

Without the customer service perspective, stakeholders only got a fraction of the story. Combining reports told a bigger picture—one that allowed them to capitalize on new opportunities. For that reason, you need to have a proper process and decision-making patterns in place so that your customer service team always feels prompt and efficient in handling customer interactions. With interactive communities, brands always have the opportunity to listen to their customers, develop the next focused marketing strategy, or even the next product. Live engagement tools answer customers’ immediate need for quick resolutions to issues. Many businesses make the mistake of focusing only on customer acquisition while neglecting the need of keeping the existing customers happy.

One of the most important aspects of growth marketing is building strong and loyal relationships with your customers. After all, repeat business from satisfied customers can be a major driver of growth for your business. Empowering the customer support team means giving them the freedom to access technology and other ways to deliver excellent customer service to make customers happy. The pairing of customer service and marketing objectives can help accelerate business growth and achieve the goals faster.

How can I measure customer service success?

These representatives ensure that answers and support are provided promptly. Joining different forces has always been a winning strategy in business. Fighting for the same goal with various knowledge and tools can only bring you to success more easily and quickly. That’s exactly why we, at DemandZEN, offer services for various businesses. We can generate meetings for your sales team, produce streams of qualified inbound leads, and integrate our lead generation campaigns with your existing business tools.

In the pile of offers, consumers turn to the ones that give the most value for the price – the ultimate experience. Moreover, studies show that customer service is far more important than price for the majority of consumers. If you can show them their needs are valued, they will be willing to pay more. Yes, customer service IS a part of your marketing operations, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Additionally, American companies reportedly lose about $136.8 billion yearly because of avoidable customer losses. Therefore, a positive or negative customer experience directly impacts your company’s revenue and growth. Empathy means that you’re putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. You want to relate to their pains, understand their perspective, listen to their concerns and show compassion when necessary.

They can also gather customer feedback through surveys or reviews to identify areas for improvement. Customers expect to be able to interact with companies through a variety of channels, including phone, email, chat and social media. This requires investing in technology that can integrate customer data across channels and provide a consistent experience. The rise and popularity of generative AI shows that this sector should not be ignored, but leveraged properly.

Most customers are tired of reaching out to businesses via social media. The queries remain unanswered as most companies are yet to make the most of social channels for customer service. A proactive approach here is essential, and this is another way you can use content.

However, marketing can be a powerful tool for driving customer service levels up. By investing in a good marketing strategy, businesses can see a significant impact on their bottom line. A brand can provide a positive customer experience by making it easy for customers to interact with the company. A strong brand can make it easier for customers to find information about the company and its products and services, and can provide a consistent level of customer service.

Customer support, on the other hand, usually involves providing support to the customer after a purchase. For example, customer support may involve helping a customer troubleshoot a technical issue with a product. It’s often the first point of contact that potential customers have with your business, and it can make a lasting impression on them. If your customer service is exceptional, it can help to build trust and credibility with potential customers, making it more likely that they will become loyal customers. The importance of communication in customer service is straightforward – you need to be able to listen to your customers and understand their needs in order to provide effective support.

With this in mind, it’s important to establish a process to improve cross-team collaboration in order to effectively share these insights. Databox is a business analytics tool that enables organizations to align team members around the things that matter. With Databox, customer service and marketing teams can align around the same metrics and goals, create a single source of truth and improve the communication of business results.

Customer service responds to consumers’ questions before and after purchasing a product or service. Customer support personnel are available in person, over the phone, via email, chat session, or even social media to answer inquiries and Chat GPT generate useful documents for self-service assistance. There are a number of ways to measure the impact of marketing on customer service. One way is to track the number of new customers that are acquired as a result of marketing efforts.

That’s the key to keeping customers loyal and getting them to interact with your brand continuously. For example, recent research that studied customer service employees in a call center setting reported that happy employees were 13% more productive. Of course, you always want a positive brand image and customer service can be a significant determining factor.

We spoke with Pessoa and Lowman to get the inside scoop on what makes their approach to collaboration between marketing and customer service work. In this guide, you’ll find tested advice on aligning both teams to support better customer outcomes. Delivering great service and prioritizing customer experiences is the key to building your brand.

• Therefore, it’s incredibly crucial to invest in this area for profitable growth and the possibility of future expansion.
• Empathy can be developed within your customer service personnel, and practicing it can be a game changer in dealing with challenging situations.
• Therefore, the customer service team needs to work towards creating a lasting impact in customers’ minds.

The short answer is that customer support is important because support agents are key for helping resolve customer queries quickly and effectively, and driving customer satisfaction. This ultimately impacts customer retention, customer lifetime value, and brand reputation. By following these tips, you can use your marketing strategies to create a positive customer service experience that will keep your customers coming back for more. The words you use in your marketing materials play a big role in setting the tone for your customer service experience.

With this, customer service and marketing teams can combine skill sets in order to achieve tasks. The Metrics Screen in Databox helps organizations align team members around the same metrics. Once you have select the metrics that are most important to you, you can invite team members to your Metrics Screen to verify your data. Your team members will also have the ability to add to your Metrics Screen with the metrics that they believe are important to track. In today’s competitive market, businesses need to focus on providing exceptional customer service to stand out from the crowd.

Prompt responses and effective problem-solving enhance your service by respecting the customer’s time. Efficient technologies and workflows can help your team serve consumers more rapidly while maintaining high service quality. While timeliness is vital, thoroughly resolving a client’s issue is critical to retaining customer happiness. 93 percent of customers will spend more with companies that offer their preferred option to reach customer service. Channel preference can vary based on issue type so companies will want to provide customers with a choice of channels. But as traditional “support” functions become more integrated with other channels and business processes, organizations are changing how they measure success.

• Effective customer service results from a coordinated effort that demands a carefully prepared strategy.
• Databox is a business analytics tool that enables organizations to align team members around the things that matter.
• While consumers in the US were primarily motivated by sharing an experience, consumers in Europe were primarily motivated by positively impacting other consumer’s buying decisions.
• Through this feedback, there’s also an opportunity for different

  trends to be identified, improvements to products and marketing campaigns to be

  tailored toward these critiques.

For Kale, customer support is all about building trust — which ultimately impacts everything from customer loyalty and retention, to brand and marketing. AI-powered tools, such as a chatbot, can help support agents deliver faster customer service in marketing responses. A bot can collect key customer information upfront and take repetitive questions off a support team’s plate. And since bots don’t need to sleep or take lunch breaks, they can deliver fast support around the clock.

It helps you to know more about your target audience and accordingly position your product/service as the best option for them. Customer service was becoming a prominent marketing strategy for our businesses even before we realized it. That’s because customer’s expectations shifted from factors like pricing of the product to the experience of the product. We need to understand that the role of the marketing team here is to help their customer service team get acquainted with prospects who are likely to show interest in such opportunities.

Empathy in a support organization helps agents read between the lines of a situation. But he encourages fellow support leaders to be open-minded about the soft skills that go beyond technical. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. There is plenty of opportunity during a support interaction to connect with customers and demonstrate empathy for their needs, Brummel says.

Customers are savvy and can spot indifferent customer service from a mile away, and, in turn, decide to discontinue the product or service. And because the customer service team talks to your customers, they know what customers are going through (instead of imagining what they are going through). They have a wealth of valuable and practical ideas that can help you to identify new needs. The importance of foreseeing the needs of your customers cannot be overemphasized. Just like your marketing team needs to know what happens in the customer service department, it works the other way around as well.

There’s a direct correlation between satisfied customers, brand loyalty, and revenue growth. Customer service plays an important part

in creating a consumer’s perception of a brand because if an interaction goes poorly

or a customer gets overly frustrated, the company may lose loyalty. Utilizing each

interaction with a customer can be used for demonstrating brand values, building

trust and overall creating a strong relationship between brand and consumer. Positive customer experiences improve customers’ likelihood to return to a specific brand and increase the probability they’ll spend more. A positive experience improves the customer’s overall satisfaction with the brand in question. Providing a streamlined, enjoyable experience to your customers is essential.

This means that every decision, from product development to marketing to customer service, is made with the customer in mind. Customers who feel frustrated, neglected, or mistreated are more likely to take their business elsewhere. And once they’re gone, it’s much harder and more expensive to win them back. On the other hand, customer B is years and mostly seeks to speak to a customer service representative, each time he needs assistance with something.

Customers who have a negative experience may be less likely to return to your business, less likely to upgrade to premium products or services, and less likely to spend as much money overall. When customers have a great experience with your company, whether that’s through a great product, exceptional service, or both, they’re more likely to share that experience with others. This can take the form of leaving a positive review on a popular review site, recommending your business to friends and family, or even sharing their experience on social media. To successfully navigate these complex issues, you’ll need to outline clear, cross-functional roles and responsibilities for the channel. By 2024, the majority of companies anticipate social customer care becoming a shared responsibility.

It has also become a benchmark that can impact your brand image and, if not done right, can easily hamper your marketing efforts at the same time. For decades, businesses in many industries have sought to reduce personnel costs by automating their processes to the greatest extent possible. Customer service should be a one-stop process for the consumer whenever possible. He not only apologized but invited this customer to be a part of the tasting panel for reviewing Virgin Atlantic’s menu. He also offered this passenger to be part of the board of the airline’s culinary council.