Companies around the world lose trillions of dollars every year due to poor service experiences. I spent more than five years of my career at a large customer service software company, and even more time working with another leader in the field, Salesforce. I know how important service is to the overall customer experience. It's hard to think of any other business function that has such a huge impact on customer loyalty, retention, and lifetime value.
So why do so many marketing leaders continue to think of customer care as “another departmental problem”? Marketing and care are two halves of the same whole. Are you concerned about your brand image? Are you concerned about your customers' overall sentiment towards your company? If you take a closer look at your company's NPS score and the factors behind it, you'll understand exactly what I'm talking about.
As social media (a channel typically owned by marketing) continues and rapidly evolves from an “amplifier” touchpoint to a preferred destination for customers seeking support, marketing leaders are becoming more involved in their brands’ customer service strategies. They are forced to play a role. Social media has already become integral to the relationship between brands and consumers. Social customer care is also now becoming a bigger part of the brand experience.
Brands that recognize this and answer calls with faster, more personalized care outperform their competitors on both individual and large-scale interactions. Let's take a closer look at this.
Rethink the customer journey
Many CMOs orient their team's strategy around the “ideal” customer journey: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Many other CMOs are also considering how customer onboarding, recruitment, and retention will be affected.
How do you deal with bumps in the road during trial or after purchase? Customers will need to get in touch with you when they inevitably have product questions, technical issues, missed orders, etc. And whether you show up on their chosen channels will impact their overall experience with your brand.
Traditionally, companies provided customer service based on their own terms. We all know the feeling when you're put on hold as her 1,000th person in line. Or repeat the situation with multiple service personnel. Slow, outdated and frustrating communication methods have become the norm for customers.
The old ways are no longer acceptable. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers notice and value that companies prioritize customer support on social, and an additional 76% believe brands are responsive to customer needs. We place emphasis on how quickly we can respond.
Customers expect fast, quality care on social media, and if you don't, you'll lose their loyalty.
The right social customer service interactions can help your customers love you even more. Or, you can let your customers explore alternatives right away. They influence everyone from people who have never heard of your brand or purchased from you to existing customers and brand advocates. When marketing leaders make customer care a priority in the customer journey, everyone wins.
Building a world-class brand is everyone's responsibility
Consumers remain price-sensitive, audience demographics are in flux, and customer needs are rapidly evolving. One bad experience can cost a customer a lifetime. And when it happens in a public space like social media, the consequences can be devastating.
(It's a fun time to be a marketer, right?)
The Sprout Social Index™ reveals that 8% of service teams and 16% of marketing teams are exclusively responsible for social media customer care. Everyone else was somewhere in between. Most brands agree that both teams need to work in harmony to provide best-in-class service.
When social marketers manage social care alone, it can take hours (or even days) to connect customers with the right service representative and get their questions answered. Additionally, when service teams are responsible for the care of every social customer, they miss opportunities for proactive engagement (in favor of addressing complaints and escalations) and communicating relevant customer insights. may not be possible.
When marketing and service teams work together as partners, service agents can quickly step in and resolve customer complaints. Additionally, social marketers can focus on creating content, engaging with communities, and interpreting customer data from service team interactions to make better decisions. This type of collaboration requires both teams to have compatible tools and appropriate resources.
Collaboration must be more than just a handoff
Many service professionals are dissatisfied with their existing technology stack and find it difficult to coordinate efforts with other teams. One-off DMs, long email chains, and mismatched tools are to blame.
According to Sprout Social Pulse Survey data from Q3 2023, only 25% of customer care professionals rate their teams as being good at how they interact with customers on social. Only 32% are very confident in their team's ability to handle customer inquiries. .
When you look back at these numbers, alarm bells should ring.
Most care teams are working with fragmented technology, leaving them unprepared and critical customer intelligence in limbo. This is especially concerning when it comes to social. Social is where care and marketing are most closely aligned, and is your direct portal to understanding your brand's performance, audience, and industry. Decentralized and incompatible tools can lead to large opportunity costs.
Without shared technology to leverage social insights, care and marketing teams struggle to increase brand affinity. Almost all business leaders (94%) agree that social media data and insights help build brand reputation and loyalty. Furthermore, 88% agree that social data is an important tool in providing customer care.
As the lines between marketing and customer service blur, marketing leaders need to do more than just master handing off tasks and tickets between teams. Changing the perception of your brand requires finding and truly aligning processes and tools that increase productivity and bring strategic knowledge to the surface.
Customer care gives you a competitive edge
When companies master the collaboration between customer service and marketing, they can create the brand experiences their audiences want. What marketer doesn’t want to be the best of the best?
According to the index, consumers believe the most memorable thing a brand can do on social is to respond to them. One-on-one engagement trumps publication volume and trends. Rather than spamming their followers' feeds with content, smart brands prioritize responsiveness to their customers and use those interactions to amplify their brand value. Customer care and community engagement strategies are content strategies in and of themselves.
Customer care and everything that comes with it (i.e. responding to comments and questions, review management, personalization, cross-channel support) is an important part of the brand awareness equation. With the right social data and technology, brands can integrate care into the mix and turn it into a true competitive advantage and revenue driver.
Take Casey's, the fifth largest pizza chain in the United States. The company consistently prioritizes responding and delighting its customers on social, building a memorable content care strategy. They respond quickly to customers in a distinctive empathetic and friendly tone, addressing their unique needs and pain points.
As another example, outdoor retailer Patagonia, known for its authenticity and community, has a world-renowned brand reputation. Just as the company is known for its friendliness in-store, it also provides great care on social. Representatives from our customer care team are ready to provide their outdoor expertise and information about our repair programs and return policies.
This level of orchestration only happens when marketing and customer service teams work together.
Positive brand perception depends on quality customer care
Customer service and marketing teams need to work together more than ever.
But CMOs and marketing leaders can't allow customer experiences to be defined by incompatible technology stacks or departmental silos. To truly deliver great customer experiences across the funnel, you need to collaborate with customer service teams to build new processes, invest in the right resources, and bring teams together in unprecedented ways.
Want to learn more about the evolving customer care landscape and how you can lead your company with innovative strategies? How Sprout Social's Social Customer Care fosters collaboration, enriches customer experiences, and unifies customer data. Please read about.
