How Your Marketing Efforts Can Improve Your Customer Service Experience

Regardless of the type of business you’re running, success is about a whole lot more than just offering innovative products and services to customers. To truly stand out from a crowd in the modern era – to create that competitive advantage you need to survive – you need to offer them a true customer service experience in every sense of the term, too.

According to one recent study, those companies with a genuine customer service experience mindset tend to drive revenue at rates that are between 4 and 8% higher than their competitors. Much of this comes down to the fact that about 86% of customers say that they’re willing to pay more for a great customer experience, too. Not only that, but about 49% of buyers say that they’ve commonly made impulse purchases after receiving a more personalized customer service experience – thus putting that final underline beneath a trend that shows absolutely no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

But acknowledging the importance of a proactive, customer service-oriented mindset. Actually adopting one across your own organization is something else entirely. But what a lot of people fail to realize is that one of your biggest assets to that end is actually one of those elements of your business that far too many people take for granted until it’s too late:

Your marketing.

The Nexus Between Great Customer Service and Great Marketing

One of the most important goals of any marketing campaign is always to encourage as many people as possible to talk about your brand. This simple idea is ultimately why great customer service doesn’t just involve great marketing… great marketing becomes great customer service, too.

Never forget that the brand experience you offer ultimately encompasses all interactions your customers have with your business – and not just the positive ones. Sometimes, they will have questions that they look to you to answer. Other times, they will have problems that they look to you to solve.

The type of collateral you create for marketing purposes therefore can’t be singularly focused on what your products and services actually do. It must also be centered around providing as much raw value as possible in and of itself.

Far too many companies make the mistake of relying on technical specifications to do their marketing for them. Sure, your product or service may be impressive on paper – but what do all those numbers really mean? How do they compare to other businesses who are going after the same people you are? How do they show people not what you can do, but what you can do for them specifically? You may also need a full-service advertising agency put all its energies not just in building a brand but also in creating a demand for its Clients product and service in an exciting manner through creative art and unique marketing strategies, try  Voymedia #1 NYC Advertising Agency.

This is why you need to break down that silo that normally separates your customer service team from your marketing team and allow them to act as the true, cohesive whole they were meant to be.  A customer shouldn’t be handed off to customer service only when they have a problem or a gripe. Customer support should play an active role in their lives to show off the genuine experience you offer that they literally won’t be able to find anywhere else.

Turning Insight Into Action

Now, there are certainly a few techniques that you can leverage to make things easier in this regard. When you create compelling video content targeting various points of the buyer’s journey and your customer’s overall journey with your brand, remember that every little element helps cement the experience you’re going for – including things like voice acting. Voice acting mastery is about more than just clarity.

You can’t speak too fast or you run the risk of losing your listeners’ attention – thus creating a negative impression at the same time. You also run the risk of losing the clarity of the message – which is problematic if your message is designed to help someone get the most out of a purchase they’ve either already made or are about to.

You also need to become a master at both intonation and emphasis – two of the simplest yet most vital elements of verbal communication there is. Depending on your exact intonation when you say something, you could come off as either enthusiastic (“don’t worry about this problem you’re having, I’m here to help!”) or cynical (“I’ll help you… but this is a problem you probably created yourself”). All of this transcends the simple boundaries of what many of us think of as marketing and allow this type of collateral to rise up to become a true part of your customer service experience.

Keep in mind that this is just voice acting. Every element of your videos – and every other piece of collateral, for that matter – needs to be given the same level of care and attention-to-detail.

Another important part of the customer service experience involves creating the impression that the conversations you’re having with your users are a genuine two-way street – something else that the right approach to marketing can help with a great deal. When you solicit feedback, for example, you probably use a tool like Visme (which I founded) to create a survey results report. This is a great way to visualize all the feedback you’ve collected into something a little more actionable, thus giving your employees the best data to work from as they make decisions moving forward.

But to let that report die as a simple internal document would be throwing out a tremendous opportunity to really support and empower your customer service experience. Instead, make it an external document, too and put it right up on your website for everyone to see. Don’t mince words or try to sugarcoat any of the details. Let people see exactly what they think you’re doing right and, more importantly, what they think you’re doing wrong. Open things up for discussion and see what suggestions people are willing to provide to help improve things as much as possible.

This is a great way to show people (not tell them) that you’re not only paying attention, but that you’re committed to a constant sense of improvement at the same time. Customer service is nothing if not capitalizing on every opportunity to improve your relationship with as many users as possible – this is just one example of how to accomplish exactly that on the widest scale that you can.

So in the end, maybe the most important thing to understand is that customer service (and the customer experience it creates) is about a lot more than just responding to emails or fielding phone calls. This is a more reactionary approach than you can afford to take, especially if you’re trying to stand out in the modern era.

Instead, you need to think a great deal bigger than that. You need to think about opportunities to be as proactive with customer service efforts as possible, not waiting for something to break so that you can fix it but instead preventing that problem from occurring in the first place.

By finally acknowledging that great customer service and great marketing are one and the same, you’ll be well on your way to accomplishing exactly that.

 

Author’s Bio: Payman Taei is the founder of Visme, an easy-to-use online tool to create engaging presentations, infographics, and other forms of visual content. He is also the founder of HindSite Interactive, an award-winning Maryland digital agency specializing in website design, user experience and web app development.