Customer Support + Marketing: Better Together
Marketing teams and support teams can work together in several ways to improve the customer experience and drive business growth. From collaboration on campaigns to enriching client data—when support and marketing work together, your business will see positive impacts on your bottom line.
However, creating cohesive collaboration between the two departments is nearly impossible without synergy between your customer support team’s tech stack and your marketing automation solution.
This blog will walk through the high-level value that a cohesive marketing/support alignment can bring to your business and share steps for ensuring you have the right tech stack on both teams to drive those meaningful changes.
What is the combined value of customer service and marketing?
Combining customer service and marketing efforts can bring significant value to a business. Creating synergy between these two departments can have a vast array of positive outcomes, including:
- Increased customer satisfaction: By providing excellent customer service, businesses can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth marketing.
- Improved brand reputation: Providing excellent customer service can help improve a business’s brand reputation, attracting new customers and boosting sales.
- Increased customer retention: By building strong relationships with customers through customer service, businesses can increase customer trust and therefore, increase retention rates and reduce the costs associated with acquiring new customers.
- Enhanced marketing efforts: By integrating customer service into marketing efforts, businesses can gather valuable customer insights and feedback, which can be used to improve marketing strategies and tailor messaging for a more personalized experience.
- Upselling and cross-selling opportunities: By understanding customers’ needs and preferences, customer service teams can identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, leading to increased revenue.
Overall, combining customer service and marketing can help businesses to build strong relationships with customers, improve their brand reputation, reduce customer churn, and even increase revenue.
How should customer support and marketing teams work together?
Marketing teams and support teams can work together in several ways to improve the customer experience and drive business growth. Here are a few examples to get you started:
- Collaborate on customer segmentation and targeting: Marketing teams can work with support teams to gather customer data and insights, which can be used to segment customers and create targeted marketing campaigns.
- Share customer feedback and insights: Support teams can share customer feedback and insights with marketing teams, which can be used to improve product development and messaging.
- Align communication and messaging: Marketing teams and support teams should work together to align communication and messaging across all touchpoints, to ensure consistency and a seamless customer experience.
- Use data to drive decision-making: Marketing and support teams can work together to analyze customer data and use it to make data-driven decisions, such as targeting high-value customers or improving the customer experience.
- Create cross-functional teams: Marketing and support teams can work together more closely by creating cross-functional teams that include members from both teams, with the goal of achieving common objectives.
Overall, by working together, marketing teams and support teams can provide a better customer experience, increase customer loyalty and revenue and achieve the business’s goals.
Finding the right tools for your needs
First and foremost, your customer support team should have a central support tool—like Zendesk—where reps go to manage support tickets, perform multichannel support, and keep their knowledge base up to date.
And, your marketing team should also have a central tool, their marketing automation platform, that they use to send out emails, manage campaigns, and understand leads.
It is critical that these tools integrate and speak with one another if you want to reap the benefits of customer support and marketing collaboration.
If you already have a customer support platform in place, but you’re looking for help to find the best marketing automation platform for your current tech stack and marketing goals, head to our marketing automation webpage. On this page, you’ll find helpful information on which platform is best for which use cases, organization types, and existing tech stacks.