In many companies, customer service is often seen as being at the ‘bottom of the chain’ due to the belief that the role doesn’t require much in terms of skills and qualifications (in comparison to other departments such as Marketing and Finance). The customer service teams are usually not involved in major decision making of a company and often last to be consulted. However, there’s a close link between customer service and marketing that people often fail to see. A discordance between the two teams, has the potential of bringing a company to its knees as much as bringing great success if they both work well together.

The definition of ‘marketing’ is basically the action of promoting and selling a product or service which can be through advertising or market research. Essentially, Marketers are responsible to build a company’s brand, ensure that their customers are engaged to it and keep on top of trends to keep their customers loyal. Whilst this is a big responsibility as a company mainly relies on its image to reach their customers, customer service has a similar role. Their position allows them to emphasise the ethos of a company to the customer directly. In other words, as the marketing team establishes the images of the company, it is the customer service team’s role to ensure that the same message is being conveyed to customers when they get in touch.

Whilst it is very important to attract customers, it is equally important, and cost effective, to keep them – which is where the customer service team can play a major role. When a customer gets in touch, your customer service team becomes your ambassadors as they would represent your brand through their way of communication and ability to find solutions for any problem posed.

5 Reasons why and how marketing and Customer

service should work closely:

1. It’s important to know that the customer service team work closer to customers than the marketing team does. Therefore, the customer service team are likely to understand what the behaviours of customers and what is required to make them happy. The marketing team heavily relies on statistics to determine the success of their brand, whereas the customer service team deals with the customer directly. Therefore, as both teams work together and provide constructive feedback to one another, this would improve the service and the image of the company as both would implement what is required to push a positive image of their company to the customer.

2. When there’s communication between customer service and marketing, there’s a unified message that gives a sense of consistency and establishes the ethos of their company. For example, if you’ve always had a very formal tone via campaigns, blogs, and social media posts, if the customer service team are not as formal when communicating with customers, this would come across as being deceiving and inconsistent. Therefore, it is important for both teams to have regular meetings and establish the tone and way of service to keep a consistent way of communicating throughout.

3. Every business’s desire is to convert customers into loyal customers who would be advocates of their product to other potential customers. Whilst the Marketing team’s role is to work on ways to entice customers with promotional perks such as deals and discounts, the customer service team would become the ambassadors of your brand as customers get in touch. With clear communication and understanding of the promotion implemented by the marketing team, the service provided to the customer could be the difference between retaining a customer or a onetime only purchase. Therefore, it is important for the marketing team to speak to the customer service team to ensure there’s a full understanding of what is being promoted so it would be easy for them to explain and serve customers well, as well as the customer services team delivering the core brand values.

4. Similarly to the marketing team coming up with ideas to entice customers, the customer service team could also provide ideas they feel the people they speak with day in day out could be interested in. They may pick up a trend of requirements and comments from customers that the business does not cover, which they could feedback to the marketing team so it could be administered and keep up with their competition.

5. Lastly, one of the main ways customers could start trusting a company, is by seeing positive reviews posted on various online platforms. For marketing purposes, customer feedback is extremely important as it helps them understand what they are doing well and perhaps not as well. Negative feedback is crucially as important as positive feedback and turning negative feedback into positive experiences can improve customer loyalty. It should be the customer services responsibility to manage all online review platforms.

These 5 points allows us to understand how important it is for both teams to work together for the success of a team. An interesting article providing more points and explaining this further can be found through this link