Customer service is never easy. To understand customer service, you need to do a lot of research and understand how to make your customers happy. But before that, you must know how challenging customer service is.
Customer service is all that the organization can do to meet its customers’ expectations. Moreover, it is the root of customer satisfaction.
Earlier the responsibility of a customer service agent was to learn and operate contact center software solutions and promptly respond to customers. With changing times, it has grown to demand knowledge and expertise so that the agents both respond and solve the customer problems to some extent.
Also, customer service affects not only your customer’s behavior but also your marketing strategies. You might wonder how these two different departments can relate. But to your surprise, smart businesses nowadays realize that these two departments go hand in hand.
When the customer service and marketing departments work together, they solve one of the major problems. The unawareness problem! In the past, the customer service department was always kept unaware of the new promotions which the marketing department launches. And as a result, they almost failed to satisfy the customers’ expectations.
However, the newly-found bond between customer service and marketing also overcomes another new-world problem. The social media feedback! When you have poor customer service, customers will give negative feedback on your social media. As a result, social media marketing strategies would fail to attract new customers.
However, to make customer service more efficient, many smart businesses are using advanced contact center software and AI-powered integrations. Excellent customer service can help boost your productivity and sales through social media marketing. However, let’s discover how the new trends in customer service are affecting your product marketing.
Recent Customer Service Trends and Their Impacts on Marketing
- Proactive Support Turns Customers into Brand Advocates
Have you heard about “reactive customer support”? It is one of the most traditional strategies of the customer service department. In this strategy, they wait for their customer to file a complaint or an issue about their products and services. After getting enough complaints, they try to get a solution to that particular problem.
When customers get good customer service, they always share it with their friends and business contacts. And this is how they become your brand advocates.
To bring this into effect, you need to be aware of the three approaches toward efficient customer service:
- Reactive Approach
- Proactive Approach
- Predictive Approach
We have already discussed the reactive approach. Now let’s move towards a proactive approach. It includes predicting future client concerns and proactively resolving them. This can take a variety of formats, including knowledge bases, forums, FAQs, and instructional videos.
Here are some additional tips for moving your customer service from reactive to proactive.
- If you notice some issues, try to contact your customers in advance. Don’t wait for your customers to contact your first.
- At the end of each call, ask customers to give their valuable feedback. Feedback helps a lot in marketing. People automatically get attracted to the product when a business page uploads its positive feedback.
- Keep your business page up-to-date. Always share valuable content through newsletters or social media platforms.
- Personalized Customer Experience Motivates People to Shop
According to Seth Godin, “Personalization is an opportunity to differentiate on a human scale. It uses human behavior as an essential indicator of what people want and what they need.”
Personalization is all about treating your customers as separate individuals. In a world full of trillions of people, it is very challenging to satisfy every individual customer. However, the traditional “one solution for all” strategy is no longer effective.
But don’t worry! There is a window of light for you in such a challenging situation. Personalized customer experience! Nowadays, people expect businesses to value their separate preferences and choices and not to divide them into specific segments. This could be somehow hectic.
But personalized customer experience and especially good customer relationship management make it easy for everyone. Delivering personalized messages, offers, and products to each person according to their preferences to enhance your marketing strategy is now possible with powerful CRM software nowadays.
Another way to adopt a personalized customer experience is to value your customers. Companies can value their customers by following practices:
- Using their preferred channels for communication.
- Allowing them to move the conversation from one medium to another as needed.
- Connecting them with contact center agents with the expertise needed to answer their questions or resolve their problems.
According to the studies, out of 100, more than 70 customers get frustrated when companies don’t offer personalized customer services.
- Adopting Contact Center Software Enhances Marketing Strategies
Modern businesses have multiple sources for communicating with their customers. As a result, they have numerous types of conversations which can be very beneficial for your marketing strategy. Are you curious about how a simple conversation can enhance your marketing strategy? Don’t worry! Let us explain it in detail.
If you are up-to-date with the industry advancements, you must have heard of contact center software tools These are the most effective solutions to communicate and respond to customers across multiple conversation channels. It can be integrated into customer service software with a ticketing feature. Such integration empowers call center agents to respond to and resolve customers’ queries in the most efficient and personalized way possible.
This call center software is considered an excellent marketing tool as it also responds to all inbound sales inquiries.
- Customer Feedback Can Boost Your Sales
Another recent trend in customer service is the collection of feedback. Seeking feedback requires humility. Understanding, analyzing, and effectively acting on it requires wisdom. So after collecting feedback from your customers, it is important to act wisely.
Customer feedback is essential to judge the lacking of your product. However, it also helps you understand the most popular feature of your product. It helps in understanding your customers’ satisfaction. The more the customer is satisfied, the more sales you can make.
However, just like positive feedback boosts your sales, negative feedback can also help you out. Negative feedback can be your best buddy when you want to improve yourself. If you take constructive criticism well and implement the necessary changes in your product, evaluators may even give your product a second chance.
According to research, 45% of people like to visit businesses that entertain negative feedback too. However, 89% of the customers read reviews before buying anything. So it is important to focus on customer feedback.
Conclusion
You get your customers through marketing. But does your service make an effort to keep them? Did it inspire loyalty and dedication to continue doing business with you?
Customer service is the most basic component of this equation. It is not too expensive. It derives from fundamental interpersonal abilities. Be considerate. Pay close attention. Put your consumer first, and make sure they know it.