Customers are an important part of the business and yet marketers spend more money on trying to acquire new ones instead of nurturing the ones they already have.
Excellent customer service is more than just sending an email reply or checking in with your customers from time to time. According to inbound marketing experts Hubspot, excellent customer service is achieved when the company and the customer are linked beyond what the latter is paying for. To quote Hubspot: “Customer support works well when there's a human element woven into the strategy.” People don’t buy into viral media campaigns anymore, they buy into people.
The customer service and the marketing departments are usually two very distinct departments, but they should work together. Each department can make the other’s job much easier.
How does it work?
- Map your customer journey with your customer experience (CX) team to ensure you understand all customer touchpoints. This exercise will help you to gain greater insights into several marketing touchpoints that may not be part of your existing model for servicing customers i.e. website enquiries, social media messaging and a website chatbot.
- Use your customer journey map to define your CX strategy. Consider the channels that need to be included for customers and use these, including self-service and customer care, the purchasing process and fulfilment as part of your strategy to deliver a great experience to customers.
- Build your marketing, sales and educational content based on these touchpoints and processes to ensure that your messages are unified across the channels.
Content must relate to CX touchpoints
Marketers know all too well how important regular and consistent content creation is for their marketing strategy. Having content catered to customer experience touchpoints will help to drive a content strategy that’s also aligned to the customer experience strategy. This will help you to devise remarkable content ideas.
Add agile content to the mix by interacting with your client-facing teams because they are constantly communicating with customers and learning about their interests. This will help to bridge the gap between how your CX marketing programme is performing and to adjust your course if you feel your customers’ needs are not being met.
Tiaan Joubert, an account manager at League Digital, was responsible for the digital aspects of a 4x4 event on behalf of our global tyre company client. He noticed that women were also signing up for the event (36 of the 641 entries were from women) and he shared this knowledge with me. I then had my lightbulb moment and considered featuring more content around women in the 4x4 community.
It’s about customer expectations
If you continue discussions with client-facing employees, they can notify you when they encounter inconsistencies between the message you’re putting out and the service that customers are receiving. Marketers can then modify campaigns with customer expectations in mind.
Unified messaging between departments
When customers have questions about a promotion that your marketing team is running, it’s embarrassing if customer support doesn't know what's going on.
That's why it's essential for customer support to know what promotions the marketing team is deploying, so they can answer any questions that pop up. Marketers should equip the customer support team with the resources they need to be successful.
Marketing brings in the customers, but a good customer experience keeps them there.
Download our Customer Experience brochure or contact us to chat about how we can help you create a digital customer experience programme that delivers growth.
