Guest Blog Author: Brandie Joy
You may think that your marketing department and your customer support team have little or nothing to do with each other, and at face value – in some businesses – you might be right. Your marketing team is responsible for getting the word out about your business in a way that generates more sales. Your support team handles people who have already spent money on your products or services or are actively exploring doing so, and they don’t necessarily need to understand the marketing side of things to deal with these existing customers. While these two types of departments may be separate in these ways, however, they should work together if your business is to reach its full potential. Here, we’ll get into how specifically digital marketing and customer service can (and should) actually go hand-in-hand.
The first rule of digital marketing is to understand your target audience. Skilled and diligent marketers will use data and analytics from your company’s website to try and direct marketing material precisely toward your ideal customers. And this, when you think about it, ties into something that was addressed previously here in a look at success stories regarding Glossier and Warby Parker. In that piece, we wrote the following: “Good customer services drives to meet what customers really want. A successful company understands their customers and produce products and services that are beneficial to their customers.”
That was written about customer experience success stories specifically. But consider it from the perspective of a digital marketing department or service. Today, such a department or service is likely to focus largely on content creation, content marketing, and SEO (or search engine optimization) – all of which involve a thorough understanding of business offerings and customer needs, as opposed to just random outreach. In an overview of its Kickstart program for small business marketing, Ayima asserts that good SEO content writing involves extensive research of target audiences. Digital marketers will learn how best to match the products and services to potential users and act accordingly.
Combine this with the aforementioned notes about good customer service meeting customer needs, and you begin to see just how closely these two seemingly disassociated departments – marketing and customer service – can actually work together. Both may have different goals and different ways of accomplishing them. But both also depend on a similar understanding of what exactly your business offers, who can benefit from it, and how to explain to those people how they can benefit from it.
Of course, this is easier described than put into practice. People in both departments are busy and have primary goals to focus on. However, the more you can get them to collaborate, the more likely you may be to see upticks in customer satisfaction. Workzone did a piece on improving collaboration between departments and suggested providing context as the first tip. In other words, you can provide holistic goals and explain the overlap between different departments’ individual goals in order to impart upon your employees not just a duty or an obligation, but an understanding of how further cooperation can improve their performance.
If you can do this, and establish a dynamic partnership between your marketing and customer service operations, you’ll be able to reach more of your intended client base and achieve a higher rate of conversion and greater general satisfaction.
CH Consulting Group provides unparalleled expertise in the Contact Center and Customer Experience (CX) verticals. We have a nationwide team of industry veterans that can assist you to achieve exponential growth, manage change, and generate profit. For a comprehensive CX assessment and strategic plan customized for your unique business needs, connect with us here today.
