Customer service is a critical business function across all industries, whether your customer is an individual, another business or even a potential new hire. But it isn’t limited to a call center or Human Resources department.
Every interaction a customer has with your business is connected to customer service, and since most interactions are now managed online, your digital marketing strategy is crucial to the customer experience. Here are some ways to enhance your digital marketing strategy to provide top-tier customer service.
Design Your Website with the Customer Top-of-Mind
Your website is likely the first interaction a customer will have with your business. It’s where they’ll go to understand who you are, what you do and whether you’re the right fit for their needs.
If immediate customer interaction is critical to your business, you should consider going the more direct customer service route and look into adding thoughtful chat capabilities or a virtual assistant to your website. If it’s not feasible for your website to include a tool for back and forth chatting, you are still communicating with the customer and have the opportunity to provide great service from the start.
There are three essential elements to providing great customer service through your website:
- Easy navigation
- Clear messaging
- Direct calls to action
When creating or updating a website, consider who your potential customer is and why they might seek you out. Answer their questions immediately through your content and make it obvious where they should go for more information, to make a purchase or to call a sales rep.
Be Responsive and Solution-Oriented
There’s nothing worse than reaching out to a business and getting completely ghosted. A lagging or lack of response tells your customer that either you don’t care about them or you aren’t organized, both of which may turn them away.
It’s important that any online communication tool you make available to the public, from email to social media to website contact forms, has at least one or two employees directly responsible for managing responses. This ensures someone is regularly monitoring these platforms and is able to respond quickly.
What’s deemed as an appropriate response time depends on the platform and the purpose. If an individual who buys from your company is reaching out with an issue via social media or chat, the initial response should come no later than 30 minutes. Any business or recruiting requests via email should have a response within one business day.
Create a Social Media Workflow
Most social media platforms have primarily become customer service tools, especially if you run a consumer-facing business. On Facebook, Twitter or even LinkedIn, a customer may write a complaint in the comments of your latest post or tag your business in a review. Whether their comment is positive or negative, it’s important to have a proactively established process in place to quickly respond and assist the customer.
Here are the steps you should follow to enhance customer service on social media:
- Designate a social media manager to regularly monitor accounts
- Draft a set of go-to responses for common situations, from thanking a customer for a positive review to requesting more details of an issue in a private message
- If the customer left a complaint or question, respond publicly with one of the previously drafted responses and follow up with a private message requesting their contact information
- Establish the point-of-contact for different aspects of the business so the social media manager can triage the issue and connect the customer with the best person to help
- The established point-of-contact should swiftly respond and manage the issue until resolved
Maintain Consistency
Regardless of where your customer is interacting with the business, they should expect a consistent experience. This means content across all digital platforms should maintain the same tone and voice. It also means that every single one of your employees, especially those in customer-facing roles, should have the same understanding of your core values and what your business provides. Set a standard for customer engagement and keep every person accountable to it.
The Partnership Between Marketing and Customer Service
In such a competitive market where customer service is king, one negative or underwhelming experience can be all it takes to lose a customer. Your digital marketing strategy needs to prioritize the customer and ensure positive, top-notch service from every point of interaction.
Not sure how to bridge the gap? CONNECTIVE Agency is well-versed in all aspects of digital marketing, from social media and email communication to website development and management. Our team has the skills and resources to develop and execute a digital marketing strategy that makes every customer a returning customer.
Learn more about our digital marketing prowess and contact our team to get started.
