by Andrew Tillery, Marketing Director for MAP Communications
What if improving your customer service was all it took to generate more sales and grow your business? No gimmicks, no flashy promotions, no big advertising campaigns; just a dedication to improve the way you treat your customers. Would you do it?
Of course you would. In fact, you’ve already talked to your team about the importance of providing high quality customer service. However, you probably still haven’t made this the core focus for your marketing strategy. The question is, why? The answer is usually focus.
Staying focused on a marketing strategy built around customer service is a long-game move that can be easy to get distracted from when you are pressured to make more sales now. This is true for almost every business, which is why companies who are able to invest and stay focused on putting customer care at the heart of their marketing efforts can grow a loyal following and stand out from their competition.
Check out these methods for how you can make customer care your best marketing strategy:
Create marketing material from reviews and testimonials.
According to a survey by the American Marketing Association, “90 percent of consumers trust peer reviews and 70 percent trust online reviews.” This means collecting and publishing positive consumer reviews can be an incredibly impactful and cost effective way to establish trust and ultimately generate sales.
There are plenty of tools and resources out there that help collect reviews from your customers. However, you might want to also consider training your customer support team to ask for reviews from customers live while they are already interacting with them.
Once you’ve collected reviews, you will want to make sure they get published in a few key places for maximum brand impact like your website, blog, social media, etc. However, you should also consider targeting some important 3rd party locations that your company would benefit from having some positive clout (Google, Yelp, Amazon, etc.).
Always be available.
The easiest way to lose a customer is by not being available to them when they need something. Solving this problem can be tricky considering your customers exist 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that when they reach out to contact you that it will fall within the standard 9-5 business hours, and only about 20% of callers ever end up leaving a voicemail. This means that if your customers decide to try to contact you outside of office hours, you might not be able to collect the information about why they were calling you. What’s worse: they may end up deciding to get in touch with one of your competitors who DID make customer support availability a priority.
To better serve all customers and protect against this risk, many companies are turning to professional call center support partners who specialize in customer care. Customer support experts like MAP Communications are known for call center solutions that provide 24/7 service with professional phone agents that can turn the tide in the battle to keep customers from going astray and establish your organization as a leader in customer service.
Nurture relationships with influential customers and encourage Brand Advocacy.
All customers are special and deserve your attention. However, some deserve special attention. These are the customers who are rabid about your brand or product and maybe even have a bit of a social following of their own. Make sure to follow these customers on the social channels your brand is on. Follow up with them now and again to make sure their experience was a positive one. Maybe even find ways to treat them special by giving them some perks or discounts so they have a strong reason to spread the word about how great your business is. Creating an army of loyal brand advocates can be among the most effective ways to quickly build a positive reputation that your future customers will notice.
Making these tactics part of your strategy is a great start to putting customer care at the core of your marketing efforts. Once in place, the results will begin to speak for themselves: literally. Your customers will start to spread the word about your brand and you’ll be there to give them a microphone so the rest of the world can hear about it.
Andrew Tillery is the Marketing Director for MAP Communications, an employee-owned company that provides answering services and call center solutions. Born and raised in Oregon and having lived for several years in Seattle, Andrew has a damp, green place in his heart for the Pacific Northwest. After graduating from Portland State University with a double major in Marketing and Advertising, he spent some time learning Spanish and experiencing all that South America has to offer.
