Why Customer Service Is The Best Marketing

One important task for every company is making sure that every department has enough resources to maintain its performance and sometimes even give better results. This is done in the annual or even bi-annual budgeting, where hard decisions have to be made, as the allowance can present a challenge.

In this article, we would like to focus on why investing in customer service also means investing in other departments, indirectly.

The High Risk of Investing in Marketing

As stated before, each department needs a minimum amount of resources to be able to maintain their numbers. However, when it comes to giving more resources, it can be tricky to decide which department should receive a higher investment.

Most companies will bend towards the marketing department, because higher exposure can bring more customers. This might not always be the case, and optimal budgeting should focus on being able to improve the overall efficiency of each department without the need of investing the same amount at the same time. When thinking about a high return investment, one of the obvious choices would be marketing, as theoretically it has a higher percentage of success and return. This, however, works more like a Russian roulette, because it might not always hit the point, or miss a cue, like Pepsi’s 2017 ad with Kendal Jenner: affecting the overall result. Investing in the marketing department is also taking a high risk investment.

Budget decision in Marketing:

• High potential return on investment
• Partly unpredictable and risky

A safer alternative - customer loyalty through better customer service

A safer alternative of investment is to care for customer loyalty through better customer service. Although the results do not offer an immediate high return, they do offer a longer lasting effect on the company’s numbers because it doesn’t only invest in optimization, but also gives more resources and a stronger ground to stand on for other departments.

Some investment opportunities in customer service are the following:

• More training for agents
• Better tools for customer service
• Artificial Intelligence to answer customers’ requests
• Process optimization of answering customers’ requests
• Detailed reports (First Contact Resolution, Average Speed of Answer, Average handling time, etc.)

By putting more resources to the customer service department, your customers will get better support, and the communication between you and them will run more smoothly. Maintaining a steady communication with customers is key for loyalty and creating a customer base that will come back for your service and will most likely recommend you.

Effects of improved customer loyalty

Better reviews and experiences create a better reputation, which by word-of-mouth will go around, giving exposure to your company. By having a reputation, those written statements about customers’ experiences can also be used as marketing material, making this investment not only safer but also more profitable. With great successful stories you can create case studies and identify the customer persona or customers’ needs, solving the issue ahead of time.

So in essence what you are doing is luring new customers in, establishing rapport with the ones you already have and fulfilling their expectations by going above and beyond, which is the key to an ever-growing customer base, as better explained with the Flywheel model.

Why Is Customer Service The Right Choice?

A high quality product also deserves a high quality spokesperson. An efficient customer service can make the difference for your company, and take the lead in the market leaving the competition behind. Unifying the answers and giving consistent solutions to the same requests shows commitment to the customer and their loyalty. This also means that marketing and customer service should communicate about campaigns, therefore investing in better tools and communication channels for both outside and inside the company can make a big difference.

Demands for better customer service:

• Correct answers to service questions
• Uniform solutions on all communication channels
• Fast response times in service
• Communication across the service department

Goals of customer service improvements:

• Customer Loyalty
• Fantastic Reviews
• New customers

What do I invest in?

It’s not only important to put more money in, but also know where to put it so it gives more efficient results. When it comes to customer service the main focus should be on improving the communication channels between your company and your customers. But how will that directly affect marketing? If you want to have a better insight about this topic, we invite you to check our masterclass about customer service in marketing.

In this masterclass, we go through customer service as a marketing tool. We began by explaining the idea behind marketing and what their goals are, then we set the foundation of what is good customer service.

After learning the basics, we give a deeper insight into customer service automation and communication channels, as in this day and age it is becoming more relevant to offer 24/7 support. We focus on the types of customer service channels, how they work at communicating with customers and which are the areas of improvement.

Tips and tricks for better service

All of this goes hand in hand with practical tips and tricks that you can easily integrate to have an overnight improvement. The idea of this masterclass is that when you finish it, you can assertively make decisions that will have a bigger impact on customer service as a marketing tool, by avoiding bad reviews, improving customer satisfaction and earning a loyal customer base.

We noticed that it is important to get this information out and decided to put it in a video format. The masterclass is still available online and you can watch it by clicking here.

Topics of the OMR x OMQ Masterclass about “Customer Service is Marketing”:

• Customer Service is Marketing
• Optimal service channels
• Artificial intelligence for more efficiency
• The best customer service

Why OMQ?

We are a company that has worked for 10 years in customer service automation, and services are used by some important e-commerce companies such as Tchibo, DefShop and Brille24. We focus on artificial intelligence to reply to those recurring requests in real time and to optimize the process, which has shown a significant improvement for those who implement it.

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