Where Does Customer Service Sit In Your Marketing Strategy?
Today, let’s talk about one of the most frequently asked questions: Where Does Customer Service Sit In Your Marketing Strategy?
If there’s one thing your social media managers don’t want to admit, they’ve been customer service representatives all this time.
In outsourcing and offshoring, customer support has a reputation for mostly answering phone calls.
However, with the verge of a decentralised workforce, it’s not the case anymore.
It’s at the forefront of a seamless customer experience.
A huge number of customers have shifted to live chat and chatbots. Here are two major reasons why:
1.) You’ll get the industry-wide turnaround time of 24-48 hours and/or 2-3 business days if you reach out via email.
2.) You’d need good reception and get charged by your service provider to call a trunk line.
With the weight of tasks siding more on socials, inbound is just as important as outbound.
Another precursor to this is algorithms. Let’s take a detour to explain that so here’s the TL;DR:
Social media platforms want businesses to invite customers to message the pages before routing them to an external link or website.
Simply because social media is free, since it is free, they need to find a way to earn.
The way they do that is by having advertisers buy media from them.
In that case, they need more users that are active on their platforms for advertisers to sell to.
If other users like you—as a business owner—take their active users away from the platforms, they won’t be able to price their media spaces higher due to the depleting number of active users.
Now that we understand the business model of social networks, it is only practical to converse with our customers first before they purchase; without even ending their session on a certain platform.
Of course, this still depends on the processes you have in your sales funnel.
Service-based businesses may require more steps like getting into discovery calls, requests for proposals, etc.
So where does customer service sit in your marketing strategy? It’s everywhere.
24/7 customer support is where you get small wins over the competition.
Having a guardrail that wherever a customer is in the funnel, they may contact you and be ready for that.
Customers prefer brands with a service with the fastest turnover, which correlates to the instant gratification caused by the mobile-first and TikTokification of the internet.
What’s good about that is it’s the best affinity that anyone can claim, you just have to prioritise it.
Focus on speed without a hinge on reducing the quality of your product or service.
Every business wants to offer perfection and there are diminishing returns to that: they take a while.
Get to the market first then improve it over time. That’s how you achieve excellence and not perfection.
Without customer support, there is no social listening. If you don’t listen to the market, customers stop buying.
In conclusion, customer service sits every time and everywhere in your marketing strategy so whether it’s midnight or weekend, don’t lose deals to a competitor.
If you’re looking for marketing specialists who value customer experience, let us know and we’ll find them for you. Keep in touch on this page or schedule a call with our experts for free.