Pro Tips: Make Customer Service Your Next Marketing Campaign

Do you view customer service and marketing as two separate departments and strategies? Customer service may have more to do with your marketing than you think.

Make Customer Service Your Next Marketing Campaign

Nowadays, it seems that forward-looking business leaders have finally realized just how important cross-department collaboration is for success. For example, sales and HR might not seem all that connected at first, but bring them together and you have yourself a winning sales team that truly understands their individual strengths, as well as the customer. The same can be said for customer service and marketing, as the two departments might not seem like they have anything in common, but when you think about it, stellar customer service is one of the best marketing tactics you have at your disposal. After all, who better to promote your business than your satisfied customers?

Yes, combining customer service and marketing is one of the best ways to attract the right customers and improve your conversions, but you need to know what you’re doing. Let’s take a look at some pro tips that will help you make customer service your best marketing campaign to date.

Start by creating a brand etiquette

Before you start introducing elements of customer service into your marketing strategy, take a step back to identify common pain points and problems that your customer service agents run into on a daily basis. What you will find is that you can significantly improve brand perception and loyalty, and thus elevate customer service and satisfaction, by simply establishing a brand etiquette that all of your employees will follow when communicating internally and externally. 

This goes for your customer service agents as well as your marketing and sales staff, so that you can ensure brand consistency on all relevant channels. Next, use your customer service analytics to identify the aforementioned pain points and focus on resolving these issues first – this will allow you to improve customer service while improving your marketing efforts through branding and your brand etiquette. You can expect customer satisfaction to soar along with brand awareness, trust, and stickiness.

Bring customer service to social media

Typically, managers and team leaders will focus on a single platform to achieve their goals. After all, your customer support team lead is tasked with managing customer service on your website or in your call center, not to manage your social media, right? Well, as we mentioned earlier, nowadays companies need to adopt a more symbiotic approach. This is why customer service should become an integral part of social media engagement and marketing in your company, as you can improve the efficacy of both departments and elevate customer satisfaction by bringing skilled customer service agents to your social media networks.

These professionals can tackle the difficult questions and resolve complex problems that would have taken your social media managers plenty of trial and error to complete, which leads to better efficiency and helps maintain your brand’s reputation in the online world. What’s more, they can take over direct messaging and use their skills to better promote your company through direct customer interactions.

Provide non-stop customer service with VoIP

In the modern business world, email simply doesn’t cut it anymore. At least not on its own. Sure, communicating via email is a great way to personalize your communication strategy, offer tailor-made products and discounts to your customers, and simply keep in touch, but if you want to truly make customer service a part of your overarching marketing strategy, you have to make yourself available to your customers 24/7. This requires, of course, a phone infrastructure which is not only expensive but doesn’t complement digital technologies and tools.

To cut costs and bring their call center into the 21st century, companies are nowadays looking to find the best VoIP solution that integrates with various IoT devices and applications, ensures 99.99% uptime, and allows business leaders to run round-the-clock call centers from anywhere in the world. This guarantees that your customers can reach you at any time, which is a great way to promote your brand and score amazing reviews along the way.

Create engaging customer-oriented content

Content marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics in your arsenal, and you should use it to generate quality leads, improve your ranking in the SERPs, and of course, boost brand authority, trust, and loyalty across the web. Now, publishing long-form articles and engaging social media posts is great and all, but what if you use the combined experience of your customer service agents to fuel your content strategy? Imagine how much more relevant your posts will be once your creatives gather the insights and knowledge accumulated by their colleagues, which will invariably take your content strategy forward as a whole and help you win over your target customer.

Leverage reviews and testimonials

Finally, one of the most powerful marketing tools is user-generated content, specifically reviews and testimonials. There are many ways you can leverage reviews and testimonials to create marketing material, so be sure to use them to come up with new content ideas, to post relevant stories on your social media accounts, and use them in your promotional videos, infographics, and of course, your marketing collateral.

Wrapping up

At first glance, you might not think that your marketing team has anything to gain from working with customer service, but in reality, your customer service agents can really revolutionize your approach to digital marketing as a whole. Be sure to use these tips to weave customer support into your marketing processes and make both departments better at what they do.