In any organization, the common goal is to get and retain more customers by providing a uniform and exceptional engagement experience. For this to happen and lead to healthy growth, it's crucial that the customer-facing departments such as marketing and customer service are able to collaborate.
In this article, we'll discuss the importance and benefits of marketing and customer service teams working together and the ways to help them align on the same vision.
Why should your marketing and customer service functions align?
They come because of your marketing.
They stay because of your product.
They stay longer and promote because of your customer service.
When we analyze the customers' journey with an organization, we see that they spend most of their time interacting with two departments: Marketing and customer service.
Marketing is the outbound face of your organization, and your customers interact with their activities and campaigns multiple times for a while before converting.
While evaluating, they interact with sales/pre-sales before converting. After purchase, whether they'll be with you for a long time or not is determined by the support they get from the customer service teams, as they're the inbound face of your organization.
This is why marketing and customer service teams should work in tandem to get their objective, messaging, and customer experience out of the organization aligned with each other.
When they do, it helps the businesses:
Streamline communication across the business
Unify the experience customers get, irrespective of the department they're interacting with
Increase customer satisfaction, which in turn cultivates brand loyalty
Increase customer retention and overall lifetime value
What happens when your marketing and customer service functions don't align?
Marketing is the face your prospects see, and customer service is the face they get to interact with when they become customers. If there is no alignment between these two departments, customers will get something that doesn't match their expectations.
Since first impressions last, businesses earn the brunt of many customers when departments don't align.
The misalignment creates hype that disappoints customers and makes it difficult for the customer service teams to provide the support they need.
It creates a negative customer experience, and some might consider dropping out of your service as it decreases their trust in you to provide the best solution for their business.
Losing their trust results in customers leaving your product, impacting your short-term and long-term revenue.
Also, customers don't always churn silently. Some might share their disappointing experience on social networks, which will affect your online reputation and diminish all the work you've been doing.
Aligning your marketing and customer service teams can help prevent this. Of course, this is easier said than done. We'll share six ways you can try to get them to work together to boost sales.
6 ways to align marketing and customer service
- Inform customer service teams about marketing activities
- Collaborate on tasks to understand the respective functions
- Build ideal customer profiles and user personas for better targeting
- Read support tickets to identify gaps in collateral and create opportunities for upsell
- Get case studies/testimonies that help conversion
- Unify teams on a single platform
Inform customer service teams about marketing activities
Sometimes, campaigns will be formulated at the last minute due to trending topics to catch the wave of the marketing teams. Informing every stakeholder—especially customer service teams—about marketing activities can bring everyone on the same page so they'll prepare their team to face what's ahead.
It isn't just the ad-hoc campaigns—informing customer service teams about regular marketing activities can help exchange ideas, instill new perspectives on existing ideas, and more.
Looping in the customer service teams also has an added benefit as they're the ones who extensively spend time with the customers. They can help marketing teams refine their messaging, positioning, and placement so that their ideal prospects can relate to and get better results.
Collaborate on tasks to understand the respective functions
Keeping the departments informed about their respective activities is the stepping stone. To expand the alignment scope, marketing and customer service teams can collaborate on tasks to understand how each works.
Collaboration will help the teams understand each other's processes, blueprints, and the difficulties they face. It'll give them a chance to review their processes with fresh eyes, and it could help infuse some change if needed.
Build ideal customer profiles and user personas for better targeting
A marketer's job is to attract and qualify leads before passing them to sales for conversion. The process' complexities can be simplified by building ideal customer profiles. Marketing teams can collaborate with the customer service teams to understand their ideal customers and where they fall under the user persona.
By doing this, marketing teams will get an idea about whom they should target, and by following this, customer service teams will get customers who need the product/service they offer and can confidently invest time and resources to nurture a relationship with them.
Read support tickets to identify gaps in collateral and create opportunities for upsell
Businesses can think highly of their offering, but what customers feel about the product can be found in the support tickets. Whether they're happy or disappointed, customers express their emotions in the support tickets, and it's a goldmine for marketers.
By making it a practice to read support tickets, marketers can learn the ground reality of how their customers see the offerings, how it's helping them, and the difficulties they face while using them.
Marketers can use customer feedback on their copy to attract more prospects, as they can relate to fellow buyers. It'll also give them an idea about what's missing in their user guides. They can identify the gaps in their collateral and ensure everything customers need is there.
Marketers can pass the suggested improvements and requirements shared by the customers to the product teams to let them know about the market needs, and they can work on improving the overall quality of the offering.
It also allows the marketing and support teams to work together to identify if there are any cross-sell opportunities available with the customer, which will result in increased sales.
Get case studies/testimonies that help conversion
Who knows who your happy customers are better than your customer service teams? They'll also be aware of the appropriate time to check with them for a case study/testimonial.
Marketers can work with the customer service teams to shortlist such customers and approach them for a case study. By collaborating, the teams can get the best out of the customers and use it as collateral prospects can refer to, publish it on social channels to increase brand presence, and more. It helps prospects relate to the pain points of their fellow customers and how they're using your product to overcome their challenges, speeding up the time taken to convert.
Marketers can also create a list of loyal customers with the service teams they can use as a test group. They can run their idea to these small, active groups to get to know their pulse, and based on the responses they get, they can tweak it for a larger target audience.
Unify teams on a single platform
To provide a uniform experience to your customers, your marketing and customer service teams should also be a part of a unified platform, which will help them understand what's happening in each department.
How Zoho SalesIQ can help align your marketing and customer service departments
With Zoho SalesIQ, the Engagement Intelligence platform, both your marketing and customer service teams can align and work together to boost sales.
The visitor insights module gives you a live view of who's accessing your website and how they're interacting with it. You can also set up lead scoring to qualify those leads and pass them to your sales teams. The customer service teams can be looped in to help the marketing team set up the criteria needed to identify the ideal target profiles.
From the chat module, marketers can see live what the prospects and customers are conversing with the support teams. Marketers can read through the chats to identify happy customers and the valuable feedback they share, as well as observe cross-selling opportunities.
Want to see how SalesIQ fares in action? Sign up now for a free 15-day trial—no credit card needed.
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