Is Your Marketing Tied To Your Customer Service?

Perhaps we should ask how closely they are aligned.  Has your customer service ever learned about a marketing change from a customer interaction?

A new buzz phrase is CX. which stands for Customer Experience. Customer experience is increasingly defined through online social interaction with companies. Consumers carry in their pockets powerful computers, which they use to do research, shop, and communicate their experiences with suppliers and their products to an online community of family, friends, colleagues, and others. That fairly new online CX now has the power to make or break a new product or even a well-established company.

Social media used to be best for sharing brief content and counting up the “likes” to measure success. But consumers now use social media to do far more: to shop, to share purchases with friends, and to launch complaints. After all, posting to a page or launching a # hashtagged tweet is much simpler than calling a customer service phone number or searching for a contact form on a website.

If marketing makes a promise or even implies a benefit and your customer experience (CX) feels out-of-step or feels you under-delivered your customer service will hear or read about it. If they are caught unprepared it will take them precious time to research the facts so they can respond properly.

That proper response can mean the difference from a minor error moving on to major news story and customers lighting up social media. It can become a brush fire that can consume your good will faster than it can be rebuilt.

Remember that all contact via social media has to be understood in a customer service context. What’s unique about handling inquiries occurring on Facebook, Twitter, and their counterparts is that the communications are public, very public and there isn’t much chance to filter responses before they are seen by ;large groups of readers. You’ll need to be responsive and audience-aware to use social media for the strongest customer service.

Customer engagement has been discussed widely, numerous high-profile conferences, seminars and round-tables have either had CE as a primary theme or included papers on the topic.

Customer engagement marketing places conversions into a longer term, more strategic context, and is premised on the understanding that a simple focus on maximizing conversions can, in some circumstances, decrease the likelihood of repeat conversions CE aims at long-term engagement, encouraging customer loyalty and advocacy through word-of-mouth. Thought similar, customer engagement and customer commitment are distinct constructs.

In store, or offline customer engagement is best leveraged by associates’ extensive brand and product knowledge, and the digital access that supports it. Equipped with a tablet that also delivers store and sales training, educated on-floor associates become brand ambassadors who can show consumers high-definition product imagery and video to help cross-sell, up-sell, grow relationships and foster loyalty.

Online customer engagement is qualitatively different from offline engagement as the nature of the customer’s interactions with a brand, company and other customers differ on the internet. Discussion forums or blogs, for example, are spaces where people can communicate and socialize in ways that cannot be replicated by any offline interactive medium. Customer Engagement marketing efforts that aim to create, stimulate or influence customer behavior differ from the offline, one-way, marketing communications that marketers are familiar with. Although customer advocacy, for example, has always been a goal for marketers, the rise of online user generated content can take advocacy to another level.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

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