Why all Marketers should care about Customer Service
Guest post by Dominic Tavassoli, VP Product Management, Eptica Picture the scene: you wake up one morning to find that your lovingly crafted company Facebook page is covered – horrors – in questions. Not the sort you wanted, such as “I love your brand, where can I buy more stuff?” but actual customer service questions and complaints! What do you do? Try to answer them yourself? Call support? Delete the complaint… and suffer a backlash ten times worse? Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned…
This sort of nightmare scene will become increasingly frequent as customers of B2C but also B2B companies realise they can get much prompter service by posting a public rant via social media than sitting on the phone for “the next customer service agent” or waiting 24 hours (or more) for an email answer. Companies and organisations need to address this situation before their brand image suffers. Every unanswered technical question is a stone in their garden, the voice of every unhappy customer now heard by hundreds, thousands of prospects, and marketing doesn’t have an unlimited budget to compensate with brand awareness activities. Your marketing database will obviously also quickly become useless if you can’t stop losing customers to bad service.
Your users expect fast, high quality answers whichever channel they use. From our experience, there are three ways marketers can team up with customer service to enhance the customer experience and safeguard their brand image.
- Implement a true multichannel Web Customer Service solution, so that all social media and Web questions and complaints immediately get routed to the support team for fast expert resolution. This will ensure your Facebook page and Twitter feed demonstrate your commitment to every customers success.
- Add a Self-Service Knowledgebase to your Web site home page, so your customers don’t need to look far for the answers they seek and never need to take their complaints public. This is a true win-win as the knowledgebase, automatically displaying the latest hot topics and tips, will drive those elusive repeat visits to your Web site
- Keep an eye on the Customer Service reporting and analytics, so you can proactively address latent pain points and budding issues with marketing tactics such as webcasts, white papers, and agenda items for your next event… or even a blog post.
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