Why Include Your Customer Service Team?
Customer service teams are more than product or service troubleshooting experts. They take orders, handle complaints, and solve any problem the customer encounters.
Ultimately, customer service is more than customer support. They have a significant impact on the customer experience. Unfortunately, customer service is often overlooked in product training, new product launches, and digital marketing campaigns. However, digital marketing campaigns (and everything else) will work better when customer service and digital marketing teams work together.
Connecting Customer Service to Digital Marketing
The reality is that customer service is a customer-facing, frontline, voice of the customer resource with more insight and rapport with the customer than many in sales or marketing. Your brand’s customer service team should be integrated into marketing strategy, planning, and campaigns because they can add tremendous value.
Where should you work with customer service? Where shouldn’t you work with customer service? may be an easier question to answer, because of the span of what can be improved by removing the barriers between customer service and marketing.
Here are some places to start working together:
- Marketing Research. Your customer service team has far more customer knowledge than any marketer. They can identify specific lighthouse customers for voice-of-the-customer research.
- Campaign Planning. Customer service personnel have invaluable knowledge of processes and systems. Planning an e-commerce campaign? They will be the ones to explain the impact of special discounts or shipping programs to the business’s customers, There are hundreds of areas where anything outside the norm can trip up delivery and negatively impact customer experience. Customer service knows where the traps are.
- Campaign Execution. Educate your brand’s customer service team about the goals and the tactics of the campaign, as well as the products involved to create internal advocates. Nothing beats the enthusiasm of an excited customer service rep who can upsell a customer or help launch a new product.
Remember to recognize and reward the customer service team for their contributions to your successful campaigns.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that customer service is an important part of any company’s marketing efforts — whether your customer service is addressed by people, an automated AI-enhanced software package, or both. On the human side, customer service is in a unique position to understand both your product/service delivery and your customers. Tap into that knowledge.
Resources
Customer Service What is Customer Service? Definition + Customer Service Skills (zendesk.com)
10 Ways Marketing and Customer Service Can Work Together https://blog.hubspot.com/service/marketing-and-customer-service
