In his recent article, Anand Srinivasan explores the theory that great customer service equals great marketing. The logic behind this thought it simple: if you deliver great customer service, consumers will spread positive word about your company and it will reach a larger audience, which gains you new customers. You hear horror stories of negative word-of-mouth experiences that ruined business, but more often than not, people prefer telling others about positive experiences they’ve had and recommending businesses to their friends and family. Srinivasan argues that customer service and marketing should not be separate entities, but rather, they should work together will build a stronger business.
There are many online review websites such as Amazon and Yelp in addition to social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook for consumers to voice their opinions on products, services and companies. Since a goal of marketing is to create a buzz around your company, providing great customer service can be viewed as the ultimate marketing tool because people using these review sites and social media platforms will generate the buzz for you by speaking positively about their customer experience with your company. A great customer experience leads to a happy customer, which leads to customer loyalty and positive word of mouth marketing. Once you have a positive buzz around your company, your internal marketing team can then build on that buzz by doing promotions through social media.
Srinivasan raises an interesting point about customer service and marketing departments. In the past it might have been the case that the two departments worked as separate entities with one having to fix the mistakes of the other, but modern companies utilize them as overlapping departments with the same end goal: sell more products and services. This is accomplished by marketing doing outreach to consumers and by customer service ensuring the customer experience and the customer satisfaction with the product or service meets their expectations. Good companies have marketing teams who set realistic customer expectations based on what their customer service team can actually deliver, while bad marketing departments set expectations too high and customer service has to apologize and clean up the mess.
If customer service and marketing work together and share the same goals and ideas, the customer experience will be of higher quality. If there is strong communication between the departments, there will be consistency in the messaging to the customers and there will be less confusion on expectations, which is often the reason behind dissatisfaction among customers. It’s important to share ideas so the marketing puts out the proper messaging to the customer. When the proper messaging about a product/service is delivered, the customer’s expectation will be lined up with the reality of the product so the customer service team will be in a better position to handle potential customer inquiries.
This blog post is based on an article from CustomerThink. To read the original article, please click the link below:
Why Marketing And Customer Service Need To Be Synonymous – Anand Srinivasan
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