Top Ways To Align Customer Service & Marketing

Picture this: you’ve spent months waiting for that perfect sweater you’ve been eyeing to be restocked in your favorite color. Finally, you get a targeted ad exclaiming that the sweaters are back in stock (OMG, the excitement!), only to click on the ad and see that the specific periwinkle blue you’ve been holding out for is still sold out – what a bummer, right?

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By now, you’ve been waiting for so long with no end in sight that you might forget about the sweater altogether, or scoot over to a competing store to see if they carry a similar product. Unfortunately, the Mishap of the Misleading Ad you received (it’s giving Nancy Drew vibes, right?) is the cost of a brand failing to align customer service with marketing.
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Why Aligning Customer Service with Marketing is Crucial for your e-commerce brand

Many brands have struggled to create an outstanding customer experience because, whether CX falls under marketing or operations, customer service has historically existed as an entirely separate entity from either.

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However, as CX becomes more critical to how consumers navigate and evaluate their overall customer journey, the walls between these two departments must come crashing down. And, brands must recognize that their alignment is more important than ever. Why? Because every single department contributes to the customer experience. Sales, marketing, operations, you name it – each falls somewhere along the customer journey and can either add or detract from a quality experience for the customer.

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It only makes sense to align these departments to create a better CX, especially when you consider that two-thirds of marketers say they compete primarily on their CX. With a proven stat like this in mind, deciding whether marketing should contribute to improving and executing CX shouldn’t even be a question.
 

Our Top Strategies for Aligning Customer Service with Marketing

When your brand aligns customer service and marketing department to nail CX, the results will generate the revenue you need to take your business to the next level. Not only does a stellar customer experience save your brand money by retaining more loyal customers who will spend more over time (higher CLTV anyone?), but it also nurtures your customers and encourages them to recommend your brand to their families and friends.

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Now, let’s talk about a few ways your brand can start bridging the gap between customer service and marketing to create a higher-quality customer experience.

1. Collaborate on a social media support strategy

Social media customer service is generally overlooked when it comes to improving or maintaining customer satisfaction, so it’s not shocking that it’s also rather disregarded as a collab opportunity for customer service and marketing. The issue here is that with 31% of customers are now turning to social media to make pre-sales inquiries – and more customers sharing their experience with a brand through social channels – marketing departments will not be equipped to handle inquiries unless they’re aligning with customer service.Therefore, a few scenarios may unfold:

• The marketing department notifies customer service about the inquiry and lets them handle it.
• Marketing attempts to respond with a solution – even if they don’t know what it is.
• Marketing reaches out to customer service for help with responding.
• Marketing sees the message, post, or @ mention but doesn’t alert the customer service team.

Truthfully, there are better options than these (even though #3 is the best amongst the 4). Aligning customer service with marketing to create a strategy is the only surefire way to ensure each inquiry, comment, or post on social media is addressed quickly and correctly to keep CX moving in the right direction.

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Here are a few tips on where to start with building this social media customer service strategy:

• Audit your social media customer service processes & data. Conduct a thorough audit to determine how many inquiries are either being messaged to or tagging your brand on social media on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Once you identify an approximate figure and what customers typically ask you, customer service and marketing can work together to formulate appropriate responses.
• Assign responsibility based on the inquiry. Decide which department will respond to an inquiry. If it’s simple, marketing can respond and direct customers to either DM them their information directly to be passed onto a support agent.
• Utilize a helpdesk tool. A helpdesk can simplify your social media customer support strategy and make it easier for marketing to send complicated inquiries or requests to customer service.

2. Sync up on new marketing campaigns and promos

When a marketing department is cooking up a sizzling new campaign to launch or promote a new product or service, it often feels like the world is moving at high speed.However, in this mad rush to formulate the offer, design, copy, and targeted ads, it’s all too easy to forget about looping in customer service. When this happens, customer service is suddenly hit with an avalanche of customer requests that they don’t know how to handle, contributing to a poor customer experience.

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Trust us – customers can tell when your marketing department didn’t share crucial info about a new promo or offer with your customer service department, and it’s not a good look for anyone. Always ensure that when a new promo is in the works, customer service is alerted and has access to the details before the influx of customer inquiries hits their support channels.

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Create a dedicated knowledge base for marketing promos

To keep everyone on the same page during sales, promos, or marketing campaigns, create an internal knowledge base that both departments can access and marketing will manage. Supplying your customer service team with all of the nitty-gritty details on your brand’s newest campaign will save them from reading and interpreting the fine print while they’re communicating with a client. Plus, their preparedness will foster greater trust in your brand and improve CX.

3. Refine your customer personas

Building your brand’s customer personas is no easy feat (check out our recent post on nailing these down), but it’s information that your marketing department must have to create effective targeted campaigns. However, when refining these personas to make them even more detailed and exact, we’ve seen many brands approach this task by assigning it solely to marketing.

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Unfortunately, this likely means that you’re missing out on an opportunity to work with another department that talks to your customers every single day: customer service, of course. Your customer service team has a wealth of knowledge on:

• Who your customers are
• What they’re asking for throughout their customer journey
• How they feel about your brand, product, and purchase experience
• Which self-help resources they enjoy using

By working together and sharing data, your marketing team will be able to create better offers and more thorough campaigns to improve CX across the board.

Align Customer Service & Marketing to Create a Better Experience for Your Customers

Take it from us – you never want your brand to be in a position where a customer is disappointed over a situation that could’ve been avoided by fostering better communication between departments. Marketing and customer service truly go hand-in-hand in creating a quality customer experience. Without their collaboration, it’s easy for slip-ups to happen on both parts and fracture the trust and dedication a loyal customer may have built with your brand. Invest in customer service today by teaming up with dedicated agents who will go above and beyond to prioritize CX in your brand. Schedule a call with our team today if you’re ready to make big changes in 2023.