Advantages of Bringing Customer Service and Marketing Together
When customer service is used as a marketing strategy, it helps a lot in improving customer retention alongside acquiring new customers. A customer driven marketing strategy with a greater focus on customer service holds great importance for businesses in many ways.
When customer service and marketing go hand in hand for a business, it not only helps delight the existing customers but also wins future prospects as well. Your business can positively affect the bottom line by combining the virtues of customer service and marketing.
Customer Service vs. Customer Retention
Many businesses make the mistake of focussing only on customer acquisition while neglecting the need of keeping the existing customers happy. By providing great support & customer service, it’s possible to make customers stick with your business and spend more.
The math is very simple: it’s multiple times more expensive to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. But how do we achieve this with Salesforce?
The answer is by coordinating marketing objectives, sales promotions and excellent customer service, you build trust with customers. Even though a client may be drawn to a competitor’s advertising offer, they’ll likely be reluctant to change brands if they consistently have a positive experience with you. The more customer service help they receive, the less likely they are to defect to the competition. When the bonds between customers and brands are strong, your teams can even make a mistake or two and still keep the customer. Be sure to keep tabs on changes in the marketplace and your competitors so that your customer service and marketing teams can make adjustments as necessary.
Customer Service vs. Customers Acquisition
There is a wealth of information available in your customer service teams. They are the ones talking to your customers, getting feedback from your customers and solving their problems. So how do we leverage this for customer acquisition? The answer lies with the analytics customer service provides.
Put simply, customer service analytics is the process of collecting, tracking, and analysing customer feedback to find valuable insights. By doing this you better understand your customer’s wants, needs, and expectations, and can build a great marketing strategy. Rank the top 10 most common questions your new customers ask? And how does that compare to old(er) customers?
Several data sources can be used to gain key insights. For example, live chat data, chatbot data, NPS surveys, CSAT scores, emails, social media comments, and feedback from the customer service team. You can bring together qualitative and quantitative data to get a good picture of your customer base. Once you have this data you can work to improve your marketing & its ROI.
It allows you to develop strong content marketing ideas, supported by real-life customer examples which adds a level of authenticity and value. Same goes for building a wiki or a ‘frequently asked question’ section on your website. Think about how much better a chatbot could perform in replying questions directly to prospective customers. In short, it adds to the development of the Buyer Persona of your potential customers. Bring all of this together and you have the basis of a new lead funnel for your organisation.