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In 2020, cross-departmental collaboration is not optional anymore. It is a necessity for any small business wanting to provide consistent and user-oriented customer experiences.

One such example is the collaboration between your marketing and customer support teams.

In this article, you will learn how they can work together to improve user experiences, boost sales, and deliver better results.

1. Better Content Marketing Ideas

Content creation is one of the most significant fields of your digital marketing strategy. It lets you build trust with your target audience, drive quality traffic to your site, engage readers, and position yourself as an industry leader.

To drive results, your marketing team needs to create data-driven content that helps readers solve real-life problems. Unfortunately, even the most experienced and creative content developers can sometimes struggle to think of revolutionary content ideas.

That is where they should consider collaborating with the customer support team.

Namely, your customer service database is the untapped treasure trove of customer information. It provides clear insights into your customers’ problems, needs, and interests.

Knowing who their customers are and what problems they face, content marketers can create more relevant and helpful content. For example, if there is a certain product feature that confuses your customers, your content team could create a video guide to explain how it works. They could create comprehensive guides, update FAQ pages, build a knowledge base, as well as enrich articles with real-life examples from your customers.

2. Personalizing User Experiences

Statistics say that customer satisfaction has already surpassed product and price. As a business owner, you need to understand that delivering one-size-fits-all customer experiences does not cut it anymore. Your customers expect you to understand their individual needs and address them accordingly.

That is where the collaboration between marketing and customer support teams is inevitable. The idea is to provide omnichannel customer experiences across all digital channels they use. To meet customer needs, invest in powerful customer relationship management (CRM) software that will help you eliminate the boundaries between your marketing and customer support teams.

Let’s take the example of your call center. When a customer calls you, they expect your agent to know who they are, whether they called before, which products they purchased, and what problems they faced. That is where integrating a VoIP solution for small businesses with your CRM software can help.

That way, you will be able to map the entire customer journey and create accurate buyer personas. Your customer support agent will see a customer’s touchpoints with your brand across different communication channels. Nextiva, for example, pulls the customer data from your CRM and shows it in an on-screen popup every time a customer calls you. Knowing who they are talking to, your agents will be able to answer the phone call with confidence and adapt their tone.

This data can help your marketing team, as well. For example, many advanced business phone systems let you calculate the customer experience score and customer sentiment. That way, your marketing team will be able to identify at-risk customers and create special offers and content to win them back and inspire their loyalty. On the other hand, they will also recognize your most loyal customers and ensure they are rewarded with exclusive content, special deals, limited offers, etc.

3. Providing Customer Support on Social

When hiring a social media marketing team, you expect them to plan, manage, implement, and track your company’s social media accounts. However, many employers also expect social media managers to provide customer service on their social channels.

If you are one of them, it is time to ask yourself whether your social media manager can recognize customers’ specific needs and handle them. Probably not. Unlike your marketing team, your customer support team has read multiple resources and enrolled in many comprehensive training programs needed to address customer service inquiries.

That is where you should consider eliminating the gaps between marketing and customer service. With the help of social media management tools, that is simpler than ever. They allow your marketing and customer service teams to communicate continuously. All customer service-related inquiries are handled directly from the social media management platforms, meaning it will be easier for your marketing team to route complicated questions to your sales team, without forcing customers to wait.

4. Centralized Brand Messaging

Say your marketing team is running a lead gen campaign. They created a killer webinar and are promoting it across all digital channels out there. When a customer wants to learn more about the webinar before signing up, who are they going to call? Your customer service agents, of course.

The question is whether your customer service reps are familiar with your marketing team’s initiatives. If a customer support team does not know anything about the webinar your marketing team has scheduled, that may harm people’s perceptions of your brand.

Precisely because of that, your customer service agents should know everything about your marketing promotions. That way, they will be able to answer any question prospects ask.

For starters, hold regular meetings, where marketers and customer reps will sit down and talk about the new campaigns they are deploying.

Most importantly, your marketing team should equip your customer support team with the resources they need to provide consistent and on-brand feedback. For example, they could create a comprehensive spreadsheet, where customer support agents can easily access the links and details for every campaign they are running.

For your customer reps, greater transparency is a time-saver. They will not need to waste time contacting your marketing team to ask them about their latest promotions, while a dissatisfied customer is waiting on hold. For your brand, on the other hand, this is an opportunity to keep customer experiences consistent and earn prospects’ trust.

Over to You

In a hypercompetitive small business landscape, companies need to focus on building a consistent, authoritative, and on-brand image. Customers are turning to different customer support channels and, no matter if they interact with you via social media, call centers, or email, they expect your agents to know everything about your marketing initiatives and sales promotions. Above all, they want your marketing team to understand their needs and address them.

That is why you need to focus on building an agile, symbiotic CX strategy that focuses on removing the boundaries between your marketing and customer support teams. I hope these tips will help you.

How do you encourage marketing and customer support teams to work together?

Photo by Georgie Cobbs on Unsplash