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Customer Service Part 1 - The Unsung Marketing Hero

Did you know, 86% of consumers will leave a brand they trust after only TWO poor customer service experiences? Customer satisfaction is a primary factor that determines the success of an organization.

Oftentimes, the customer service department is a siloed part of the business, working independently from the marketing team. While customer service and marketing are different departments, looking at them as two distinctly different teams could be causing issues in your customer experience. Customer service spans the entire customer lifecycle - from sales to marketing to operations. Because customer service has touchpoints at various points in the customer journey, it's important to have a complete CRM to help manage the customer relationship across all departments. GreenRope’s complete CRM can help. 

Even though businesses frequently purchase CRM software to manage prospects and current customer interactions, most do not leverage their CRM for customer service, or their CRM isn't equipped with the functionality to manage customer service. Just like sales and marketing should be integrated into the same software solution, so should customer service. GreenRope’s all-in-one software is not only backed by the best support in the industry, but it also turns your entire business into a client-centric model. An integrated solution allows you to manage every aspect of the customer relationships across all departments. You also get a 360-degree view of your customer experience and encourages inter-departmental collaboration on customer service (CS) improvement initiatives.

Read on to learn how customer service and marketing work together for an excellent customer experience (CE) and marketing strategy.

Customer Service and Marketing Share the Same Goals

Traditionally, marketing focuses on acquiring new leads and converting them while customer service manages and maintains these relationships. That being said, marketing also plays an important role in maintaining them through targeted outreach, engagement, and upsells. Therefore, bad customer service is bad marketing and vice versa. 

For example, have you ever told a friend about a poor customer service experience you had?? The answer is probably, yes. A bad experience leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, inherently altering your perspective of the company. The more bad experiences you have, the less likely you are to purchase from that company again, and you certainly won’t be referring your friends and family. Bad customer service creates a domino effect of bad marketing. Negative word of mouth or a lack of referrals are both forms of marketing. Whereas, the more positive experiences you have, the more likely you are to refer your friends and family to that company. 

In order to maintain a good Net Promoter Score (NPS) [the measurement used to predict your business growth based on your customer experience] your company needs to have more significant promoters than detractors. Check out this article for more tips on improving your net promoter score

Key takeaway: The cost to gain a new client is anywhere from six to seven times as much as it is to retain an existing client. This simple fact is why marketing and sales push so strongly for great customer service. They got them in the door, they closed the deal, and now they want to keep that customer happy. Customer service is oftentimes on the front lines of the customer retention initiative. You can significantly affect your bottom line if you successfully improve your retention strategy and keep your branding and marketing campaigns consistent throughout every touch point.

Collaboration for Marketing Strategies and Buyer Persona Development

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal and current clients. These representations are useful for your entire team to get an idea of who your customers are and provide insight into their challenges, needs, and wants. Customer service, marketing, and sales can all use this information to improve their communication with leads and customers.

Benefits of creating buyer personas:

  • You will better understand the consumer's requirements, issues, and concerns.
  • You will be familiar with the areas of your website/store where visitors spend the most time.
  • Maintain uniformity throughout all aspects of your company.
  • Enhanced forms of closed-loop analytics
  • Better product development.

Understanding buyer personas is essential for the development of successful marketing campaigns. 

It is in the best interest of marketers to work more closely with the customer service team to comprehend business challenges, customer requirements, and ideas to build customer-centric content. Marketers should attend client team meetings and participate in customer conversations to understand the personas they target with their marketing efforts for the simple fact that customer service has a lot of insight into the customer that marketing doesn’t necessarily have. This in-depth customer data can help marketing significantly improve their marketing campaigns.

Collaborative Communication for Efficiency and Better Results

Shared Records

The availability of all-in-one contact records that house customer service and marketing data can improve efficiency and job delivery. Each team will have a 360-degree contact vantage point, giving them easy access to every touch point that is stored in one place (i.e., complete CRM) making it easy to segment, pull reports, identify trends, and any other insightful customer data to help them in client management and quick decision-making.

Communication

Communication on a lateral level across different departments is necessary to keep your branding and marketing messaging on track. 

The customer service personnel on the front lines interact first-hand with clients. Consequently, they understand what the consumers want, what they look for, and what draws them to particular goods or services. The team must communicate customers' input to the marketing teams to properly adjust external communications. This strategy will attend to the needs of an ever-evolving consumer base. To that end, having a single contact record to house all that information makes it much easier for each team to access, analyze, and use to promote and drive your business. 

It is more straightforward than ever before to engage with your customers by implementing digital transformation and data management initiatives, such as launching a customer relationship management system (CRM). A CRM is a tool to handle all interactions and relationships between your clients and business. CRMs improve customer satisfaction rates and enable better customer care.

Takeaway 

Good customer service is good for marketing. Utilize comprehensive CRM like GreenRope to connect your marketing and customer service for optimum utilization and collaborative benefits.

Contact us today and start improving your small business marketing campaigns and customer service for successful growth and competitiveness.

 

Melissa Filich Blog Bio

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