“Please hold on, I’m going to find the solution for you,” the support team replies to a customer’s question. It is the equivalent response of a store salesperson wandering aimlessly through the aisles when you ask where a product is, as if you could not have done it yourself.
Customers will eventually contact customer service or support with a question asked over the phone or in an online chat window. It is difficult to have all the answers at your fingertips. The problem is when this becomes recurrent – support or customer service employees seem baffled each time by the issues or questions raised by their customers.
Does this situation look like your company’s? If so, use your marketing department to fill these gaps.
You may have heard the term “smarketing,” which describes the ideal alignment of marketing and sales through shared goals and direct communication. What if I told you that the same alignment could benefit marketing and customer service / support?
There is a critical opportunity for Marketing and customer service to help each other better serve their shared audience. Here are six ways marketing can help the support department transform the customer experience, and the benefit marketing can receive in return.
6 ways marketing content can help customer service
› Distribute marketing content regularly in your monthly summaries
Customer service or support may already receive the company newsletter, but their conversations with customers can benefit from more personalized recommendations.
An email dedicated solely to these employees, offering a summary of the more product- or customer-oriented content from the previous month or quarter, can ensure that the team is informed about the issues that Marketing has identified among the audience.
Where to start? Identify the latest ebooks, how-to articles, and technical data sheets that your website offers for download, and highlight the key points of each article in this recurring email. Also known as “middle-of-the-funnel” content, this type of content can be extremely useful to a support team because it strengthens product understanding. Putting this material in the hands of customer service ensures that their comments to customers are consistent with what they can read on your blog or website.
› Create an accessible content library
An intranet or collaborative communication platform (such as Slack, for example) for sharing resources with colleagues is the ideal place for content sharing. According to the “CMO Council,” 40% of salespeople’s time is spent searching for content created by marketing. Because customer service also talks to customers as often as salespeople do, it stands to reason that they do the same. So distribute this content on an intranet page or communication platform created for sales and / or customer success.
Sort relevant articles and resources by common customer requests: an article on good email subject lines, for example, may be appropriate under the theme “how customers can stay out of their own customers’ spam folders”.
› Monitor interactions on social media
What do social media and community managers have in common with customer service or support? They see a large number of complaints, but in comments on Twitter or Facebook rather than over the phone or in the chat window. Sparkcentral’s customer service experts show that only 8% of marketing and customer service employees work hand in hand on social media. So this is an opportunity to seize.
If the internet has taught us anything, it is that people are more willing to be honest about their feelings and experiences behind a computer screen than in person or over the phone. This means marketing could be sitting on a goldmine of feedback from social media followers that customer service has not seen.
Want to help them serve your customers better? Start a conversation with customer service teams to report the latest interactions with the brand’s social media followers. This should include both public comments and private messages, allowing customer service to see how Marketing talks to users and diagnoses their customers’ issues.
› Join launch or implementation meetings
Customer service departments that are also in contact with new customers sometimes face specific questions during the first calls.
For example, in the marketing sector, a customer may ask “what content should I publish?” and/or “how do I integrate my CMS with your product?”. The first question may go beyond the product issues that customer service employees are trained to handle. However, these meetings cannot take place frequently, and it is important to respect everyone’s time. If your marketing employees are segmented by specialties, consider including them in meetings that match their area of expertise. If their workload simply does not allow it, it may be in the best interest of the rest of the team to entrust this responsibility to marketing management (to the CMO, for example).
› Reporting on chat conversations
Chatbots and other online chat tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) are not yet ubiquitous in marketing, but for companies that have deployed AI-powered chatbots, these transcripts are invaluable for your customer service team.
Chatbot technology enables companies to talk to customers via messaging apps – or natively as a feature of their website – with an automated “robot” programmed to answer common questions about their services.
If your company hosts a chatbot, it has probably been configured to handle quick-answer requests so that customer service can spend time solving more complex problems for customers. However, this could also mean that a record of very interesting questions between a prospect visiting your website and a robot speaking on behalf of your company is invisible to employees, and therefore they learn nothing from it. This chatbot may be designed to lighten the load of questions normally asked of a customer service representative, but do not let the archives of automated conversations go to waste. Go a little further and examine how people interact with the chatbot.
People tend to rely on chatbots for usage-related rather than technical needs, so examine your reports to see the information-seeking trends of your users that they cannot find in the content on your website.
For example, you could compare customer service requests with the number of people asking the chatbot about an integration of your product, against the few details your website provides on the subject itself. It is therefore time to create informative middle-of-the-funnel content …
› Use their ideas to improve your marketing content
As with “smarketing,” the role of Marketing and customer service works both ways. Customer service can offer marketing valuable customer information, allowing marketers to improve their content so as to answer the questions generally asked by customers to support / customer service.
Just like marketing teams, customer service has the ability to distill its content into an internal email intended specifically for salespeople. Customer service probably keeps track of the transcripts or recordings of its conversations with customers. Consider working with your counterparts in this department on a simple report highlighting frequently asked questions during calls. Who knows? The company’s blog or website may be overlooking your customers’ most pressing questions!
Furthermore, brainstorming sessions should not always be exclusive to the Marketing team. Everyone in the company can contribute useful content suggestions, and customer service in particular could use this content to turn it into an FAQ article or a tutorial video. Feel free to invite them to your next brainstorming meeting!
Companies with the best customer experience are those that share information from all departments, and customer service is part of that. By keeping this department informed about what marketing does all day, you equip them with relevant answers to provide a better experience throughout your contacts’ conversion funnel.
At Webmecanik, we regularly enrich our FAQ to provide you with answers to your questions in an educational and simple way, and we also create tutorial videos on our YouTube channel, to support you with marketing automation.
