Customer Service as a Marketing Strategy

Many marketers use social media to provide customer service — and not just to engage with their audience and promote content. But is your marketing team’s social media manager really capable of handling these customer service issues as effectively as someone on your team? TikTok has been around for a relatively short time, but you can already find brands using it for proactive customer service. It uses TikTok to post customer reviews and mini makeups tutorials for its followers to try. This not only showcases the brand’s products but also creates an engaging online customer experience.

I’m looking for quick and helpful responses to my problems and I expect that companies will offer several different avenues to address my concerns. And as I make purchasing decisions, whether it’s for a hotel, airline, or clothing item, I will often factor in previous experiences I have had as a customer with a company. A marketing strategy is your company’s approach to turning consumers into customers.

Ultimately, a solid customer-driven marketing strategy is a way to leverage your current customers as marketing assets. Here are some of the key components of an effective customer-driven marketing strategy. Redefine customer service with an AI-powered platform that unifies voice, digital and social channels. Power channel-less interactions and seamless resolution no matter the channel of contact. Successful marketers understand how important regular and consistent content creation is to their marketing strategy. Your customer support team has been given the proper training and resources needed to assist customers and resolve issues — meaning you are the best people for the job.

• Customer marketing is, in large part, the art of building customer loyalty and enthusiasm in the hope that those elements will ultimately translate to new business.
• A brainstorm between the marketing and customer success teams could bring about a loyalty program that customers are clamoring to join — without creating too much of a heavy lift for the marketers.
• If the customer gets stuck, provide the knowledge base article as a handy, additional reference.
• Letting the customer support team look over the buyer personas can also give them some helpful insights.

This is evident in a consumer survey by Verint, which in 2021 found that USAA had the highest customer satisfaction score and the highest Net Promoter Score among insurers. Both of these measurements indicate that the company excels at customer experience and is more likely to be recommended by satisfied customers. To keep departments focused on your company-wide goal of emphasizing the customer experience, your business must be transparent from the top down.

Ask for feedback and learn from customers.

When a customer has a question, your customer service reps need to have the answer. Knowing how to use your product or service will help your reps empathize with your customers and be able to fix any issues that arise. Customers expect to be able to interact with companies through a variety of channels, including phone, email, chat and social media. This requires investing in technology that can integrate customer data across channels and provide a consistent experience. Regardless of the size or nature of your business, you stand to gain a lot from carrying out effective customer marketing. Once you have customers on board, the last thing you should do is cast them by the wayside.

By engaging with customers in real time, Starbucks not only addresses concerns but also enhances its brand image by showcasing responsiveness and dedication to customer satisfaction. A valuable customer loyalty reward could very well involve your marketing team — like a social media share of your customer’s resources, or a featured guest post on your blog, or a co-marketing opportunity. A brainstorm between the marketing and customer success teams could bring about a loyalty program that customers are clamoring to join — without creating too much of a heavy lift for the marketers. If you share content regularly on your company’s blog, your social followers might engage with you about what you’re writing about on social media.

This implies being respectful, courteous and treating customers with dignity and respect. It also means being calm, patient, composed and constructive, especially when dealing with frustrated or unhappy customers. The brand then showcases this authentic content in its marketing materials, fostering a genuine connection with its community. Such targeted campaigns exemplify how user-generated content can be a powerful tool for both product promotion and community building. What started as a small platform in China has now taken the world by storm.

It structured the organization in line with best practices, building a combined response and resolution team. Previously, many customers turned to social media as a channel of escalation when more traditional service channels failed to address their concerns. Today’s customers are increasingly using it for general requests, queries, and feedback—even compliments.

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On the off chance they do make contact with customer services, it wouldn’t be surprising if they have specific questions about the email marketing they received. Yet, as different departments are often kept quite separate, your customer services may not know anything about the specific marketing campaign and even your marketing strategy in general. Having an understanding of the customer relationship marketing definition is crucial to developing a great strategy. The marketing personnel in your company need to be able to use this tool to provide excellent customer care. They must know how to cultivate relationships with their prospective and current clientele.

To achieve this, Instant Brands has embraced a top-notch approach to social media customer service. Your customers have the power to make or break your business—and not just through their wallets—a customer marketing strategy can turn your customers into brand advocates. According to The 2023 State of Social Media report, 66% of business leaders say increasing brand reputation and loyalty is a top priority.

One very telling indicator of an effective marketing team is when leads have clear expectations for how your business’ products and services will help them. And when leads have clear expectations, the transition from lead to customer, as well as that customer’s subsequent experience as a customer, can go much more smoothly. This is how the marketing can help prevent customer churn, since that is often the result of misleading expectations marketing and customer service that can be attributed back to misleading marketing campaigns. The great thing is, your team is talking to customers all the time, meaning you probably know more about them than any other department within your company. So, because understanding buyer personas is so critical for creating effective marketing campaigns, it behooves marketers to work more closely with your team to help them truly understand customers’ needs and thoughts.

Strategies for Achieving Marketing and Customer Service Alignment

Despite this fact, not enough companies take employee satisfaction seriously—particularly in the case of customer service employees. According to our 2022 State of Customer Service report, almost 40% of customer service leaders say that their company views customer Chat GPT service as an expense rather than a driver for growth. Of course, you always want a positive brand image and customer service can be a significant determining factor. Your online conversion rate can improve by 8% when you include personalized consumer experiences.

This is the classic face-to-face interaction with customers, like when you walk into a store and ask for help finding that perfect pair of shoes. It’s ideal for those who love to shop and prefer human conversation and a social setting at the same time. There’s tremendous utility, versatility, and value in a well-constructed customer referral program. It’s essentially an official channel through which you can turn customers into evangelists — a program that incentivizes the projection of positive, customer-generated publicity.

Marketing strategies are diverse, encompassing online and offline channels, aiming to build brand awareness and attract potential customers. Frustrated, she reaches out to your company’s customer service through social media, desperately seeking assistance. Your support team rises to the challenge and promptly deflects the agitated customer to a step-by-step setup guide on your knowledge portal. Coming up with a system that enables members of your customer service team to participate in customer service-related inquiries via social media will only make for a better customer experience. If you’ve read our articles on the benefits of sales and customer service alignment, you likely understand the importance of a customer success strategy that leverages cross-departmental collaboration and integration. The last question you’ll need to answer is how frequently customers are using this channel.

By collaborating with your customer service team, you provide them with an opportunity to review scheduled content for clarity. Leveraging their firsthand knowledge of customers, they can proactively address potential issues before they arise. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. When customer service and marketing teams work together, they can better identify and act on opportunities for surprise and delight.

Keep reading to learn the ten ways marketing and customer service can work together to achieve mutual goals and solve for the customer every step of the way. The most notable insight from our survey was that most people preferred to call or email for customer support instead of using social media. Even though social media has gained popularity, it’s still not the most common method used for contacting customer service teams. With that in mind, it will be interesting to see whether this percentage (52%) decreases over time, as more social media apps are developed and more businesses invest in this medium for marketing and customer service. The easier it is for customers to reach your customer support team, the more likely it is for a bad experience to turn into an opportunity for creating customer delight.

It’s no secret that COVID-19 changed the way companies do business and impacted customer service and marketing teams. With many relying on online sales instead of in-person shopping, it’s more important than ever for business owners and their staff to deliver a stellar customer experience. That’s why it’s vital to align customer service with your marketing and sales teams to accomplish customer support goals.

Now that you have a better idea of the various types of customer service, let’s take a look at some specific examples to provide a little more context and inspiration for your business. When someone goes shopping, they usually are approached by a customer service representative who asks if they need help and then rings them up. You should be able to convey your message in a brand-friendly manner that makes it easy for the customer to reach out and listen actively to solutions. Representatives need to have a working and vast knowledge of the product and must be able to meet expectations. An uninformed representative could only worsen the relationship between the customer and the company. It keeps them engaged, makes them articulate the value of your product or service to their friends, and ultimately wins you new customers while making the current ones that much happier with your business.

Part of connecting with your customers is by being social and joining the conversation. And this means finding and responding to conversations you’re mentioned in—even when you’re not tagged. Creators serve a similar purpose—to pair a trusted voice and perspective with your brand. This is one of the reasons why unboxing content is what 42% of marketers say they hire content creators to produce. There’s an inherent authenticity to the “first impression” expressed in these posts. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, UGC and customer testimonials are one of the top content types consumers want to see more of on social.

Once teams are looking at a shared goal, all the work that goes into getting there makes a lot more sense. With external Approval Workflows, directly share a link to a post that needs approvals from outside of your team or org. People can leave comments, and you can review feedback and approvals all from one hub within Sprout, keeping feedback consolidated—no messy spreadsheets or confusing threads required. People are likely already tagging your brand—in a mention or through a hashtag. This is one of the best ways to find UGC to repost and posts to engage with. And Posts that feature products and how people use them—like this Post when McDonald’s asks their audience, “remind me to take my mcflurry out of the freezer in 13 mins” so it doesn’t get too frozen.

• A background in tech and engineering is probably a requirement, as well as a degree in a related field.
• You can ask customers how likely it is for them to recommend your social media customer service to others.
• Of course, there are many strategies to choose from, so we recommend combining at least a few approaches to see the best results.
• It involves creating awareness, generating leads and converting those leads into customers.

When you call your credit card company to dispute a charge and speak with a representative, that’s customer service, too. Voice of the Customer is a new role at HubSpot, and this person might sit in Customer Success, Customer Service, Operations, or within the company leadership team. Their job is to represent the voice of the customer within the company to advance customers’ best interests when high-level, cross-functional decisions are made and priorities are set. This role requires strong empathy, active listening, and an openness to change.

Conversely, when your company’s customer service is excellent, you’re more likely to see your customers stick around and eventually try more of your offerings. Consumers consider customer service when they’re making purchasing decisions. In fact, 78% of consumers use customer service to decide whether or not to do business with a company. This means that your company’s reputation for customer service will impact a large majority of potential customers. But service that isn’t personalized and makes customers feel like no more than a ticket number in the system harms customer retention. 62% of consumers think businesses can do more in terms of personalization because they’d prefer to feel like an experience is all about them.

Teams should also have direct access to all relevant functions within the business to

expedite and prioritize resolutions. Specialist teams can be trained to manage influencers and sensitive posts to minimize the risks of individual customer complaints creating reputational damage. The primary enablers of social media servicing include clearly defined workflows that guide the end-to-end journey from customer post to resolution, and appropriate supporting technology such as AI (Exhibit 2). When humans have a memorable experience—good or bad—it’s natural to want to shout about it from the rooftops. But, of course, today’s rooftops are review websites and social media, with 55% of consumers sharing their purchases socially on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social sites.

What is customer centric marketing?

“I think politicians already today should consider whether there are other alternatives of how they could support people that may be effective,” he told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4. Kristy Snyder is a freelance writer and editor with 12 years of experience, currently contributing to the Forbes Advisor Small Business vertical. She uses her experience managing her own successful small business to write articles about software, small business tools, loans, credit cards and online banking. Kristy’s work also appears in Newsweek and Fortune, focusing on personal finance. For example, Facebook is excellent for targeting the Baby Boomer generation, while YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are all better for reaching younger users.

All departments must practice good customer service in order to keep a customer happy. This means that customers in any stage of their purchasing cycle and interacting with any department should receive excellent customer service. It is very important for organizations to change the policies of old and have marketing and customer service work together, as each department can make the other’s job easier and achieve goals faster.

Ronnie Gomez is a Content Strategist at Sprout Social where she writes to help social professionals learn and grow at every stage of their careers. When she’s not writing, she’s reading or looking for Chicago’s next best place to get a vanilla oat milk latte. While eliminating data silos may seem like an obvious choice, the reality is that investing in new shared tools takes a lot of work.

Use this guide on marketing strategies and best practices to help convert consumers into customers. Maintaining a positive approach to customer service can be difficult if your customers are frustrated with your product or service. A rule of thumb is to stay calm and try to meet the customer where they are, to empathize with their situation and why they might be upset. Driving customers away with a negative attitude will only cause more pain for the business, as it can lead to a poor reputation and a decrease in sales.

Using a dedicated influencer marketing platform, like Tagger by Sprout Social, to manage and foster your creator partnerships can streamline your strategy. McDonald’s shines in their ability to post extremely relatable, customer-inspired content. The rep pays less attention to what they’re going to say and more to what the customer is saying at the moment.

Or perhaps you haven’t even developed well thought-out buyer personas in the first place. If you’ve already taken all of these steps, then chances are that you’re likely picking up on quite a few customer queries — maybe tens per day and even hundreds per month. That means that it’s important to set up a prioritization system for determining when you can let a customer query slide, and when it’s critical to respond. Once you’ve figured out where customers are connecting with you on social media, you need to determine how you’ll connect with them quickly and efficiently when they do it in the future.

As the major force behind your business, not only do you want to attract clients, you want to raise customer satisfaction to keep them coming back for the foreseeable future. Customer relationship marketing is extremely important to businesses of virtually any size. To address these challenges, the same Pulse Survey found 45% of customer care leaders intend to invest in integrated technology that enables their teams to collaborate within unified systems.

The outcome of empathy can look like treating customers kindly when they enter your restaurant, allowing for refunds within 30 days, and assisting them in their decision-making process. The role requires an ability to communicate effectively and an understanding of computer systems. It’s extremely helpful to have a technical background in order to properly understand your company’s products.

Rather than waiting for customers to report issues, this approach reaches out to them before they know the issues exist. This tells customers you’re constantly working to remove roadblocks from their user experience. Customer service makes new customers more trustworthy of your business and allows you to upsell and cross-sell additional products with less friction.

Rather than hoping they’ll see promotions for this feature, the rep who managed the case should reopen the support ticket and notify the customer. This level of personalized support shows a genuine commitment to customer success. If you’re a more introverted customer service rep, don’t feel pressured to act as bubbly as your extroverted colleagues. This can even backfire in some cases as it’s hard to focus on keeping up an act while simultaneously working with a customer. Look the customer in the eye and smile often — even if you’re on the phone, smiling will help portray a positive demeanor.

It saves you time and resources, enabling you to prioritize product development, marketing and sales. The cost for this varies from country to country and can range from $6 to $50 per hour. Two of the primary endgames of a customer-driven marketing strategy are garnering customer loyalty and facilitating customer evangelism. Those factors tend to hinge upon your customers’ experiences — their experiences with your product or service and their experiences with your company as a whole. This point applies to virtually every kind of marketing, and a customer-driven marketing strategy is no exception. The success of these kinds of efforts inevitably leans on your ability to understand and approach the people you’re trying to appeal to.

When a clear solution isn’t available, your team goes above and beyond to create workarounds that help customers achieve goals. And, if there’s absolutely no way to solve the customer’s problem, your team relays the feedback to management so your company can work towards a long-term solution. Customers now have more options than ever before, and they’re not afraid to take their business elsewhere if unsatisfied with their experience. So it’s now on brands to meet customer expectations if they want to attract and retain loyal customers.

But churn occurs when a customer stops doing business with a brand and it’s often because of a poor customer service experience. They are responsible for representing your brand when interacting with potential buyers. Customer service can break a company’s chance to turn a potential customer into a loyal customer.

The high visibility of these channels means that getting it right is not only a matter of creating great customer experiences but it also can significantly

boost a company’s reputation. This article explores the challenges facing organizations as they shift toward using social media as a full-service channel and offers an approach to excel at delivering end-to-end customer service on social channels. Loyalty is rooted in trust, and customers can trust real-life humans more than the ideas and values of a brand. So, by interacting with your customer service team, those customers can hopefully build life-long relationships with your business. Your existing customers are 50% more likely to try a new product and spend 31% more money on it than a new customer, while new customers are only 5-20% likely to buy a product.

Repurpose and use positive reviews in your visual content, captions or Stories to build trust and social proof. Reps need to be educated with expert-level knowledge of products/services to provide the best service. Some of the most well-known business success stories can be credited to great customer https://chat.openai.com/ service — at least partly. The Ritz-Carlton prizes employee engagement — because it believes engagement is the key to cultivating employees who are also dedicated to improving customer engagement. Learn more here about its philosophy — along with actionable takeaways you can bring back to your team.

The company did not reply to CNA’s queries on whether customers affected by the misleading claims would get a refund. Those who bought Sterra’s air or water purifiers say that the product is still functional, or that requesting a refund would be too troublesome, especially given their previous experience with the company. Gone are the days when salespeople could close a deal and never speak to the customer again.

Using these lists, identify what the separate roles should include and what they are not. Ensure everyone is equipped for their role, knowing how to delegate or pass on jobs that they shouldn’t be doing. Keep the knowledge base up to date, sending out reminders when new pages have been added or updated to keep everyone – even the entire company – in the know. If you are looking for an expert to get you on your way, check out what Mailchimp can do for you. One thing you can do routinely is send a personalized thank you note to a client that buys a product or uses a service.