Every business screams attention, especially customer-facing ones. There’s no debate: Happy and satisfied customers lead to more money, business growth, and customer retention.
No matter how unique your product is, it’s bound to fail if you can’t prove its worth to your prospects. That’s why businesses should always keep an eye on how they offer customer service alongside their marketing efforts.
Read on to discover how customer service and marketing intersect and how these two bubbles can fuel your business.
What is customer service?
Customer service is all kinds of support you offer to your customers. It includes the entire process of searching, trying, buying, and using your products and services.
Offering customer service contributes to customer purchasing decisions. It also enables them to have a breathable experience with your brand.
Apart from the traditional phone support, businesses can also provide exceptional customer service through email, social media accounts, messaging, web, or even text messages.
Contrary to popular hearsays, customer service is more than just answering customer inquiries. It’s about being analytical in resolving their problem, respecting their needs and boundaries while leveraging your brand’s features.
Customer service roles needed for your marketing efforts
As mentioned above, your marketing efforts would be useless if not partnered with excellent customer service. But what exactly are these customer service roles that can benefit your marketing efforts?
Social media customer support
Almost all businesses of all sizes use social media, and there’s no reason as to why you should have social media customer support.
This function can help you talk to your customers and provide them with the assistance they’re seeking. But to effectively do this, companies should invest in the hiring and training processes required for the job.
Many organizations opt to outsource social media experts and support to provide exceptional customer service possible to ensure the best performance.
Content marketing
Successful marketers know how important it is to produce consistent and relevant content as part of their marketing strategy.
But to produce consistent and relevant content, marketers need to have a steady flow of ideas and engaged creativity in making content. Knowing that creativity is subjective, this is not an easy task for businesses.
Coming up with remarkable content ideas that your audience can find value and relate to is done collaboratively. That’s why having a whole team of dedicated content creators can ease this struggle.
If you have a dedicated team solely grouped to work on your content marketing needs, you’ll be able to produce consistent and relevant content.
Omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel marketing is a form of customer service support that provides unified and integrated channel support for customers.
Meaning, consumers can now choose to interact with the brand of their choice on various platforms. It could be via email, text message, social media, or through a website.
The incredible thing about omnichannel is that it can combine these channels into one system giving users the consistency and convenience they need.
With an omnichannel strategy, you can personalize your messaging based on the recent searches or preferences of the customers. If you are well-informed of their entire history, it will be much easier for you to resolve their needs.
Virtual assistant
In place of having high-volume customer requests and information, you still need to give an avant-garde solution for your customers. This isn’t easy with a brimming amount of marketing data you need to monitor.
This is where the role of virtual assistant comes into the picture. These trained professionals can handle project management support for your marketing department.
Some of the daily, repetitive yet non-core tasks they handle include social media management, market research, and ad monitoring. Hiring a virtual assistant can boost your company’s work efficiency so you can focus more on main tasks.
Where the line meets
All managers and marketers want the best for their customers. This could be addressed by providing them with the most accurate market trends and products, or by actually helping them address their needs.
Our answer, of course, is both. Both marketing efforts and customer service are indispensable aspects of any business. They should not collide with one another.
As you ensure that you’re gathering proper research for your marketing efforts, you should also be able to share these results with your customers and apply their feedback for improvement.
While your sales and marketing teams focus on placing your customers through your sales funnel, customer service teams should work hard on retaining them and converting them into loyal customers.
If done correctly, you will see how these two can define and shape how consumers perceive your brand.
