What is Service Marketing? Definition, Strategies, Examples

You want to extol the virtues of an integrated organization and provide real-world examples of how other companies have successfully made this fundamental shift in operations. While this shift might sound easier said than done, it certainly can be accomplished when approached strategically and methodically. Through this strategic approach, you’ll inherently strengthen your marketing mix — in turn enhancing your organization’s ability to meet your customers’ needs. When sales and customer service work together, they succeed by giving the customer a better experience.

Depending on your customers’ satisfaction following their  interaction with your CS team, they will either remain or leave. Let’s say, for example, that a customer reaches out to your CS team due to a misunderstanding and a subsequent issue regarding one of your advertisements. Maybe the customer couldn’t get access to a free trial or discount that they thought they were entitled to.

Services Marketing: definitions

Consider cross-training employees and having your marketers sit on support calls with customers. Take advantage of internal communication apps and the best CRM software to keep all departments informed in real time and coordinate actions. For example, if a customer calls customer service with a promotional question, the answer may need a follow-up from marketing.

A positive experience with customer service creates loyal, happy customers that spread the word about your service, driving referrals. It also means you need to motivate customer service team, train them well to figure out and act on opportunities to improve customer service. Customer problems aren’t the only discussion topic your customer support team shares with the marketing. They are also often the best equipped and first to identify cases of customer happiness and success. Your customer support team has been given the proper training and resources needed to assist customers and resolve issues — meaning you are the best people for the job. You’ll also want to collect and assess any qualitative data your customers provide with regard to their experiences with your organization.

Empowering customer service representatives

Support tickets will often contain appreciation from customers — find what these are about, and use it in your marketing messaging. Similarly, look for customers’ annoyances that might be hiding in plain sight, dig into support data, and use it to tweak your marketing strategy and make it more impactful. Use shared inboxes for handling support, so both teams have access to customer support data, making collaborating on user personas and messaging easy. Customer support’s priorities are to ensure that the product is being used as per guidelines and educate customers with instructions, apart from minor troubleshooting. Marketing-induced expectations from new customers can make customer support’s job more difficult, as customers rely on support to fix things for them. This builds up a vicious cycle of marketing hype that often will disappoint customers, make it difficult for support to serve these customers, and lead to negative customer experiences and even churn.

Your customers don’t view customer service as a department — it’s your entire company. When treated well, happy customers are your strongest brand advocates. They spread word-of-mouth and leave positive reviews, which helps define your online reputation . Here are concrete benefits for why you need these groups to work together. Customers intrinsically expect the best experience from your products or services.

Using real examples from existing customer experiences raises the confidence of the target audience in the company and the products. The communication lines with the customer should always be open and transparent. The marketing personnel should inculcate the habit of regularly reaching out to the customer to understand their issues and problems. They should provide possible solutions and alternatives to address those. This cannot responsibility of only the actual customer service teams.

Read more about https://www.metadialog.com/ here.