Consumers have long stopped responding to in-your-face marketing. In this day and age, recommendationsfrom friends and trusted peers, social media word-of-mouth, and online reviews from sites such as Yelp or Angie’s List are factors that hold maximum sway over their buying decisions. People want fast, efficient help and/or information when they’re making a purchasing decision. Not surprisingly, long sales pitches and marketing brochures with less quality stuff and more useless fluff just don’t cut it anymore. In short, today’s consumers have no trust, no time, and absolutely no patience for traditional marketing tactics. Having said that, there’s another area of your business (besides sales and marketing) that is also struggling to cope with the rising tide of Joe Public’s power. Customer service.
Customer Service In A Customer Driven Era
Traditional customer service has always been thought of as a post-sale activity, but that’s no longer the case. Modern consumers expect brands to engage with them long before they have made up their minds to buy, and long after they’ve closed the sale. Today, you must think of customer service as a factor encompassing the entire buying cycle.
Even in term service channels, we have moved way beyond the phone call and/or email ritual. Brand-customer interaction is happening over many different channels and consequently, customers have come to expect top-notch service and assistance on all of them. However, not many brands are winning at this type of omni-channel customer service experience. A recent study by the Northridge Group found that 42% of consumers expect a response from companies on social media within an hour, however, one-third of those who contact brands through social media regarding a customer service issue or inquiry never get a response.
Make no mistake, today’s customers adroitly use social media to voice their brand experiences, both good and bad. And trust me when I say this, one bad encounter is all it takes to sabotage your brand image, or, at the very least, lose a customer. Recently, an Ovum survey found that 76% of consumers stopped doing business with a brand after only one bad customer experience.
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When Worlds Collide
Today, customer service reps not only require a solid understanding of consumers and their behaviors, but they also need to deliver services in the ways buyers prefer. Chances are, their colleagues in the marketing department are already doing these things as a part of their job, and in a world where word of mouth, upselling and cross-selling are so important, customer service and marketing need to go hand in hand. For instance, often the customer service team remains uninformed of the special discounts or promos that the marketing people advertise. This leads to confusion and, of course, unnecessary frustration for customers.
Another factor that ties marketing and customer service together is the growing importance of social media as a customer service platform, as well as a marketing platform. A 2015 study revealed some telling statistics around stoma service and social media:
- Fifty-eight percent of customer service teams view managing social media inquiries as their top challenge.
- Churn rate can increase by 15% if organizations fail to respond to customers on social media.
- Forty-five percent of customers share negative reviews on social media.
- Sixty-three percent of consumers read negative reviews on social media.
- And, 65% are likely to speak negatively about their customer service experience.
What we can conclude from these statistics is that as far as providing customer service through social media is concerned, it is becoming more and more important to have people who are highly trained in social customer service take the lead.
Content Marketing Meets Customer Service
Here’s yet another area where marketing and customer service’s lines are becoming blurred. The importance of content in marketing cannot be overstated, but often marketers fall short of coming up with ideas that resonate with their audience and add value to them. As the people whose job entails communicating with customers, knowing their needs, and resolving their problems, customer service teams can offer rich insights to content creators in terms of valuable ideas, real-life examples, and excellent case studies.
With customer retention increasingly becoming a marketing function, customer service is now an integral part of the marketer’s job. In fact, it’s essential when it comes to building and nurturing customer relationships simply because marketing’s focus has shifted from acquisition and even retention to turning customers to brand advocates. This requires nothing less than stellar customer service. To that end, marketing needs to collaborate with customer service to raise the customer satisfaction quotient—an absolute necessity in today’s business environment.
When we think of companies that have built their brand and business through great customer service, such as Zappos or Apple, it’s important to consider how much PR and word of mouth they receive for their customer-focused overtures. For Zappos, repeat customers contribute to 75% of their sales, and those returning customers tend to make larger purchase the second or third time around. In Apple’s case, a majority of their buyers already own one or more Apple products. Evidently, good PR has the power to provide new opportunities, increased sales, and more importantly, loyal customers for a lifetime.
Therefore, companies that want to really grow their business and gain a competitive edge should focus on customer service not just for the purpose of sales or after-sales, but also as a way to enhance their marketing efforts. As I mentioned above, the lines between marketing and customer service are now blurred, and businesses need to shift their efforts accordingly to turn their customers into loyal brand advocates.
