How Integrating Customer Service and Marketing Can Build Successful Consumer Marketing
This week, the MarketingSherpa team is running the official Media Center at the world’s largest ecommerce event – IRCE 2016. We’re interviewing speakers, industry experts and brand-side marketers to bring back ecommerce lessons for you. To get notification when this year’s interviews will be available visit our IRCE 2016 Media Page. Until the videos are up, here’s an interview from last year’s event.
When you go to a restaurant and your customer experience before the meal arrives is terrible, you’ll most likely refer to that restaurant as being terrible, even if the meal was amazing. Customer service has the power of leaving a bad taste in your mouth.
Customer service and marketing now work together more than ever. At the MarketingSherpa Media Center at IRCE 2015, Courtney Eckerle, Managing Editor, MarketingSherpa, interviewed Katie Laird, Director of Social Marketing, Blinds.com, on how her team was making amazing strides with their customer experience.
Advantages of using customer feedback
“If you don’t live it and breathe it, you’re not going to grow from it,” Katie said.
Blinds.com incorporated that mindset in every department. Alignment needs to be required from every team member and must trickle from the top down. Product vision is a fundamental element that needs to be distributed throughout the company.
Incorporating customer service with marketing not only helps to expand the buyer persona, and content creation, but even product marketing.
What does this look like
Inspire each department to always keep the customer experience at the forefront of every decision being made. At Blinds.com, Katie said, every meeting involves discussing how to continually improve the experience for the customer.
Find ways in which you can visually present to the internal teams how their work is impacting the customer experience on a daily basis. Think also of ways to reward your employees for good work and positive customer interactions.
Remember: If one patron doesn’t feel satisfied with their experience during their encounter, it can ruin the entire relationship between the customer and the brand.
Understand the value of customer feedback
Katie refers to Blinds.com as a “customer-obsessed company.” The team uses every piece of feedback available to capture how their customers are responding to their products and company.
Other marketers are aware of how valuable this feedback can be as well. In a post on why social media is the new customer service hotline, Courtney Eckerle provided examples on how customer interactions can build ongoing relationship and how negative complaints can be spun into an opportunity.
What does this look like
The key here is to use data and analytics to your advantage. At Blinds.com, there is a dedicated team that works with the marketing team to review each and every piece of content from customers. If you haven’t placed UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) code on custom URLs that you are producing, that would be a good place to start. UTM codes help Google Analytics track traffic from all of your campaigns.
Vanity URLs for each campaign would also be helpful to create during this process.
Remember: Most customers who are reviewing your company are motivated enough to help the customer service team and marketing do their job better.
Engaging customer feedback
In this American Express Survey, 70% of consumers are willing to spend an average of 13% more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service. This shows the loyalty consumers feel toward great service from brands they interact with on a consistent basis.
What does this look like
Recognize the importance of social media and online reviews. Monitoring each channel is key as more consumers are reaching out via social media these days. How quick is your response time to customer issues? The faster it is, the higher the level of satisfaction customers will feel. Find ways in which you can collect detailed information from your consumers, by encouraging them to reach out on their experience and how you can make it better. Let them know that you want to do all you can to make them feel special, because without customers, your company doesn’t exist.
Try placing these suggestions into practice when and where it makes sense for your brand. For Blinds.com, after listening to its customers discuss their fears about power tools, they created a completely new product line with blinds that didn’t require drills. Think about similar ways in which your team and company are able to use customer feedback to your advantage.
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Categories: Consumer Marketing B2C, Consumer Marketing, customer service, social media, transformation
