7 Tips for aligning customer service and marketing

Good communication is key to any successful relationship, and that includes the relationship between your customer service and marketing departments. When this communication breaks down, the results can be costly and far-reaching.

However, when these two departments are effectively aligned, they can collaborate to give your customers a positive experience that will lead to more sales. Let’s take a look at some useful tips for promoting and keeping those vital lines of communication open between your customer support and marketing teams.

1. Establish clear goals and expectations

The first step to good communication is to make sure that everyone is on the same page right from the start. You need to sit down with your customer service and marketing teams and discuss what the goals and expectations are for each department.

Establish very clearly what customer service needs from marketing, and what marketing needs from customer service. By aligning these two departments from the beginning, costly misunderstandings and miscommunications down the road can be avoided.

2. Set up regular check-ins

Good communication doesn’t just happen; it takes effort, planning and ongoing commitment. One way to make sure that customer service and marketing are always on the same page is to schedule regular check-ins where both teams can consult with each other.

And these check-ins don’t have to be long or complicated! A simple 15-minute meeting once a week should serve the purpose very well. During these meetings, each team can update the other on any new projects or initiatives that are under way.

3. Create shared cross-team functions and roles

To ensure effective customer engagement and consequently customer satisfaction, as already indicated, your marketing and customer care teams must work together. An excellent way of achieving this is for members of both teams taking up roles in the other department that fall outside of their typical functions.

For instance, the specialised insights of your customer support agents can be of great value in marketing functions like new promotions and marketing campaigns.  Likewise, staff from your marketing department can bring their unique insights to generating promotional content and adding data to your knowledge base.

Related content: 10 simple ways to deliver personalised customer service

4. Create integrated workflows between customer support and marketing

Shared workflows between marketing and customer support won’t only improve communication between these two teams, but will also highlight priorities for both of them. You can use email tags to highlight issues that are important to both teams, and share templates between them.

Encourage transparency in processes that affect both teams, and always make sure you onboard new team members on both sides effectively. As both teams become better versed with each other’s workflows, it will also make it easier for them to collaborate in developing new joint initiatives to the betterment of your CX.

5. Craft coherent and unified CX across all platforms

Customers look at all your communication channels as a whole. The sum of all your interactions with your customers on your various platforms, will define your brand’s image and the CX it offers your clients. Any inconsistencies between the channels will assuredly come back to haunt you, as will raising unrealistic customer expectations.

You therefore need to review all your consumer touchpoints on an ongoing basis. Ensure that you offer your customer a welcoming, unified, coherent, and rewarding customer experience that they will want to come back to again and again.

6. Empower your customer support agents to upsell

The interactions your customer support agents have with your customers can be improved by leveraging marketing insights to pinpoint and identify upselling opportunities. And by making sure that your marketing team is well informed about the relevant issues that customers regularly face, they will be much better equipped to come up with effective scripts your customer support agents can utilise for cross- or upselling.

Support tickets and issues should also be highlighted to make it easier for your support agents to identify when a customer needs to upgrade their current product, plan or service, and issue effective CTAs (calls to action).

7. Encourage feedback

Finally, it’s important to encourage feedback between customer service and marketing. If something isn’t working well, or if there’s a miscommunication, don’t be afraid to speak up! By fostering an environment of open communication, you can help prevent small problems from turning into big ones. Knowing that their concerns are being heard will also boost morale in both departments.

In conclusion

Customer service and marketing are two essential departments in any business, and they need to be aligned. By improving communication between them, you can ensure that they’re working towards common goals. By implementing the tips above, you’ll be amazed to see how the improved communication between these key departments will benefit your business as a whole!

If you need any help to achieve the successful alignment of your customer service and marketing departments, don’t hesitate to call us. Digital Customer Care Company has the skills, knowledge, and wide-ranging experience to help you do this!