How to Tie Together Customer Service and Marketing

Lauren Allen 4 years ago

In the next video in our 'how-to' series, we're going to explore the benefit and value in tying your marketing and customer services together, and give you five small simple tips as you embark on your next campaign to make the content, or campaign even stronger. Click to the video, or read the transcript below.

Transcript

Quite often when people think about marketing, their mind skips straight to thinking about the end product and in particular, the planning and delivery of the specific campaign or strategy that's going to get them there.

Now there's no denying that that seamless deployment and execution of that ad, display or email marketing campaign isn't crucial to success. But has anyone stopped to think about some of the more obscure, 'behind the scenes' factors, that make up a successful marketing campaign? To put this into perspective, if you're part of an in-house marketing team, let me ask you a quick question - how many times have you involved your customer service team with your marketing plans?

True marketing begins at the moment your customers start engaging with your marketing campaign; and if you haven't considered them, or the very team that knows what does and doesn't make your customers tick, then your marketing campaign doesn't have all the ingredients for success.

So, in this video, we're going to explore the benefit and value in tying your marketing and customer services together, and give you five small simple tips as you embark on your next campaign to make the content even stronger.

First and foremost, put the customer at the heart of your campaign – say goodbye to the traditional marketing funnel model and hello to the flywheel.

So, why is the funnel dead? Because it puts the customers and particularly their loyalty and advocacy at the very end - once the sale or conversion is made, your marketing interaction is over.

But the flywheel utilises all of the teams which should be involved in customer interaction - your marketing should attract consumers, your sales process should engage them on a personal level and, once sold, your follow up communications should delight your customers.

Picture the model as a spinning bike - when you push on that pedal the momentum starts. You want your sales and marketing activity to gather speed constantly, pushing past any friction. You should be delighting your customers with other useful content, by incredible results, or by exceeding the expectations of what the original sale was.

And unlike the funnel, the customer isn’t the end of the sale. Using the flywheel, you need to continue attracting your existing customers to come back, and improve your retention. Brand loyalty is a large part of how consumers make their purchasing decisions in this day and age, so it’s all about keeping the wheel moving with continuous momentum. Figure out where your friction is, and how you (or the relevant team) can ease it, and then start to build momentum around your strong areas.

Now when we talk about putting your customer first, this is exactly where leaning on your customer service teams can come in handy.

The second tip is before you embark on even thinking of what you want your marketing campaign or strategy to be, is to make sure your customer service team are present in any meeting or brainstorm session that you have about it.

Whilst I'm sure your creative teams always come up with a plethora of great ideas, let’s be honest, when you’ve done campaign after campaign, sometimes thinking of a new idea can be hard work. Given that this team are constantly speaking, listening to and engaging with your customers on a daily basis, they may have a whole host of ideas around what your consumers would need, want and like to see, that can then feed into your strategy or campaign. Importantly, they’ll also have a pretty good idea of what will resonate well with them; find those pain points and answer them! And if you nail this from the start, the more chances your campaign will stick, be impactful to your users and give you the desired results.

Thirdly; as you’re thinking of your strategy, the next port of call should be to consider which of your customer personas you want it to target for any given campaign.

When you’re doing this, don’t just assume you know who they are – even though you may have carried out heaps of research and gathered a tonne of data to come up with your fictional character personas, but make sure you validate these with your customer service team before you storm ahead with them as gospel.

Not only will your customer service team know if they are accurate representations of the real people they speak to, but they’ll be able to provide you with a greater understanding of where the friction lies in their customer journey.

What’s more, if you really want to hone in on those personas, rather than asking your customer service team to come to you with this information, go to them; if your business is the type that predominantly deals with its customers over the phone, there is huge value in hearing these conversations for yourself. Ask if you can sit in and listen to a morning of calls with your customer service team so you get a true flavour of the people they’re working with – we’ve done this with a few of our clients and the knowledge we’ve gained from it has been invaluable.

Finally, once when you’ve come up with your campaign idea and know who you want to market it to, make sure you then define the messaging and tone of voice of it; and when you do, you guessed it, but make sure your customer service team get the chance to feed into this – after all, there’s no point in having a tone of voice if they know there’s no chance of it suiting or fitting in with your customer profile.

But again, once you’ve defined it, don’t just stop at defining it for the campaign; make sure every team has had sight of it and uses it in everything customer-facing that they do – being consistent with your messaging will help to cater to a better overall customer experience, which all help towards brand advocacy and loyalty, not only throughout the journey but crucially at the end.

Whilst these tips may not feel ground-breaking it’s surprising how many businesses forget about them when building out their marketing campaigns – when everyone is busy focusing on meeting the demands, goals and KPIs of their own teams, it’s too easy to become siloed and forget to involve others across the business with what you do. But when it comes to marketing and catering for your customers, it’s crucial for these two teams in particular to be joined up to make sure that flywheel continues to move seamlessly.