For many years, marketing and customer service teams have been operating in different spheres. As a result, there was the common problem of one hand not knowing what the other was doing. But lately, many businesses are starting to realize the importance of bridging the gap between them and having them working towards the same goal: capturing their target audience’s attention and improving customer experience.
Customer service operators focus on enhancing customer satisfaction. To achieve this, every team member should be aware of the tactics employed by the brand’s marketing team to understand the customer journey and move leads down the sales funnel. On the other hand, marketing teams need customer support feedback to get inside the customers’ minds and maximize omnichannel marketing efforts.
A lack of alignment between these teams could cause serious problems in your business strategy. Even worse, it might lead to creating friction points between your prospects and your brand. To help you overcome the challenge, we have compiled a list of the best ways to bring your marketing and customer service teams together.
Customer support agents have a wealth of knowledge, given that they spend their working day interacting with customers, whereas marketers have all the resources, tools, and creative mindset to build a memorable customer experience. Working side by side can do wonders for your revenue and overall business success. If you are wondering how to make it happen, just keep reading.
When customers fail to understand your brand messaging, chances are they will stray away from it. Brand messaging is crucial for a lead to know if they can relate to your business. That’s why marketers need to make sure to build and get across a unified brand messaging that represents the company’s values.
Customer service is probably the first department leads will contact in order to ask about marketing campaigns or events. Now imagine your customer support agents know nothing about that upcoming webinar on how to create high-converting real estate landing pages or a recently launched social media contest. Chances are that the lead who contacted customer service will be left feeling frustrated or thinking that your brand is unreliable.
To prevent that, customer service representatives should be aware of everything the marketing team is up to. So, marketers have to provide support agents with all the necessary resources to address every potential customer inquiry. From where to learn about a product release to how to access an upcoming event, they should be armed with resources like FAQ content and relevant links. On its behalf, customer service will share useful data like chat transcripts to help marketers address arising issues and create a unified message that customers can identify with.
Is that enough, though? Unfortunately not. Except for unified, your messaging needs to be consistent. Your customer experience should be aligned with your overall marketing message. Try to avoid spontaneous changes so that customers don’t get confused, but make sure to adapt to changing customer requirements. The only way to do this is by maintaining constant communication so that the marketing team takes customer feedback, suggestions, and complaints seriously.
Customer support operators spend their day talking to the exact audience your marketing team members try to target. Once your marketing and customer service departments begin collaborating, it will greatly impact your content creation. Even the savviest content creators may struggle with content optimization tools to help them produce content that solves their customers’ pain points.
But when they work hand-in-hand with the support team, they get to hear their target audience’s preferences, problems, and hesitations right from the horse’s mouth. Through this process, the marketing team gains access to a wide range of viable ideas. So, make sure to set up regular communication between content creators and support agents to exchange information on customer pain points and brainstorm on a content strategy that addresses them.
You can even ask your customer service reps to be on the lookout for finding customer success stories. Then, your marketers will use them as examples of customer success to understand what your business does well and where there’s room for improvement. Plus, this insight into customer needs keeps your marketing team away from promoting features that are of no use to your audience. So, not only do you reduce complaints made to your customer service team but your marketing department can tell if the content they produce is targeting the right prospects.
It is common ground that empathy in customer support is a prerequisite for handling customer inquiries or complaints. Marketing professionals have a lot to learn from their customer service colleagues regarding emotional intelligence and empathy. All interactions between your customer service department and your clients reveal valuable information on how to make the customer experience more meaningful.
Just as customer service isn’t limited to IVR solutions, marketing shouldn’t be only about numbers, deadlines, and tasks getting completed. Instead, it should be about understanding your customer personas’ deeper desires and needs and creating content that speaks to their hearts and minds. You should be answering questions like the following:
The customer service team can easily collect and manage this data and help marketers turn it into actionable strategies. Empathetic marketing teams tend to focus on who their customers are and tweak their marketing message to their concerns and expectations. You build customer loyalty and get ahead of the competition by improving your offer through these valuable audience insights.
Speaking of customer loyalty, every brand wants to build a successful loyalty program that customers will be eager to join. Customer loyalty programs are a surefire way to keep customers engaged and bring them closer to your brand through personalized offers. When combined with robust customer loyalty program software, brainstorming between marketing and customer service departments helps you reach that particular objective and effectively promote your unique selling proposition.
Whether you are rewarding customers with special discounts, credits, or promotions on specific marketing channels, your customer support operators can offer customized incentives during conversations with customers to entice them to join the program. Then, they will share all relevant findings to help the marketing team enhance the customer loyalty program and its overall strategy.
Also, support agents are able to back the program by identifying the areas that create friction. From their end, marketing team members will make sure to remove these friction points to create a seamless experience for customers. What’s more, they will be able to promote the customer loyalty program and increase its visibility without wasting valuable time guessing what it is their customers need.
As customer support operators go, one thing is for sure: they talk to customers all the time, addressing their complaints, receiving feedback, and ensuring they get the customer experience they deserve. Therefore, they know more about them than any other department and have all the valuable data to truly understand their needs and desires. Rather than waiting for the customer operators to bring in those customer insights, marketers can join in on customer calls and form their own opinions on the personas they are targeting.
Buyer personas are fictional profiles of prospective customers that suggest how they think and behave. These profiles provide you with valuable information about the inner workings of your ideal audience groups, such as their pain points and needs, their browsing and buying journey, where they spend time on your website, what marketing channels they prefer, and more. Your marketing team will quickly implement a strategy that defines your prospective audience based on the customer feedback received.
Refined buyer personas are a prerequisite for creating effective marketing campaigns that meet your prospects’ expectations. They can even give you new insights on how to shape your communication and content marketing strategies and tailor them according to each buyer persona’s specific needs. In a few words, carefully developed customer personas will serve as a guide for all future interactions with your target audience.
We live in an era when customer expectations go beyond the pricing or features of the product or service in question. Having customer service and marketing departments working hand in hand, you can modify existing marketing strategies to set customer experience as a priority. Together they will bridge knowledge gaps to understand their audience while complementing each other to create an enhanced customer experience.
Exchanging valuable customer insight is critical to reaching that objective. However, you will need to establish long-term collaboration between customer service and marketing departments throughout the entire customer lifecycle. To do so, make sure your customer support agents adopt a marketing attitude and that your marketing team members enter into the spirit of customer service.
