How To Turn Customer Service Into a Marketing Strategy

More often than not, a customer service interaction is a result of something going awry. A faulty product, a confusing service, or another issue triggers a call, email, or instant message. But this also presents a golden opportunity. By stepping up and resolving an issue, you can create a loyal customer and build a stronger reputation.

By leveraging your customer service efforts as part of your marketing strategy, you ingrain customer satisfaction in your brand identity and put it front and center for your audience.

This article can help you get started by outlining the benefits of designing a customer service marketing strategy, describing how to do so, and providing software resources to make it easier.

As you turn customer service into a marketing strategy, you bring a range of benefits to your organization, all of which strengthen your brand and support your revenue stream:

• You create a well-rounded brand identity, one that shows you have both a great product and that you put customers first.

• You establish systems that link customer service with marketing, such as integrating customer reviews with your marketing collateral. You can then replicate and scale these initiatives over time.

• You foster a customer-first culture, not just within your customer service team but also throughout your sales and marketing teams, particularly because customer service becomes a central tenet of your marketing strategy.

For SMB leaders, a customer service marketing strategy empowers your customer service efforts by linking them with your ability to gain and convert leads. At the same time, it gives your marketing strategy a more customer-centric focus. In this way, customer service marketing simplifies your strategy. It eliminates the need to awkwardly combine the two by stuffing round customer service attributes into square marketing holes.

Marketing customer service strategies also solve a difficult business challenge: Figuring out how to leverage your strong customer service in the lead generation and sales processes. By combining marketing and customer service, you use the way you treat customers to boost the appeal of your organization and its offering. Otherwise, awesome customer service can end up being a somewhat wasted asset.

At the same time, you also provide extra incentives for your staff to improve their customer service skills, especially because they’ll play a role in your marketing success. This is particularly important in light of what GetApp’s 2023 Futureproof Marketing Survey found: 30% of marketing professionals say customer service skills is one of the areas they find the largest gap between existing skills and skills needed to meet their business goals within their marketing team.*

The root of a good customer experience is all about your consumers and their preferences. Gartner’s "A Framework to Align Marketing, Sales & Service to Impact Growth" found that even though marketing, sales, service, and customer success have traditionally operated in silos, it’s no longer wise for a successful business to keep them separated. What’s more, the goal should be to integrate them on a systemic level. [1]

If you leverage the following four tactics and use technology to help, you can turn your customer service into a marketing strategy by allowing your good reputation to work for you. In this way, you foster brand loyalty while attracting new customers.

1. Evaluate your brand’s current customer service

To maintain a positive customer experience and transform it into a marketing strategy, you have to assess where your customer service currently stands.

Reading customer reviews can provide valuable insights such as:

• What are our customer service strengths?

• What do we need to do to better serve our customers?

• How can we streamline the process and make it easier to execute?

By using customer feedback to drive changes, you’re able to focus on already-identified areas that need improvement or updating. And if there isn’t enough customer review data out there to draw any conclusions about your brand or business, try surveying existing or new customers for honest answers about both overall customer satisfaction and their individual experiences.

2. Provide self-service solutions

We’ve mentioned both customer service and customer experience, so let’s distinguish the two:

• Customer service is the assistance, advice, and overall customer support provided by a company to consumers.

• Customer experience is the entire purchase process from beginning to end, including everything from how a customer navigates your site to how they receive your goods and/or services.

Self-service solutions, like chatbots, provide predefined and AI-based responses to customers when agents aren’t available at any time of day and across multiple time zones.

Solutions like these are a great way to streamline your customer service and customer experience in one solution. Even though incorporating a self-service experience may seem daunting, with advances in generative AI, it’s relatively straightforward. You can embed an AI-powered chatbot with a knowledge base consisting of company info, product information and specs, and FAQs directly into your website.

Such self-service solutions are a win-win for businesses and consumers alike, cutting down on response time and enabling customers to quickly get their own answers.

3. Provide flexible fulfillment options

At the height of the pandemic, businesses saw consumers taking advantage of contactless pickup and shopping experiences for their own safety. It turns out that consumers enjoyed the flexibility businesses offered to receive their goods or services in new ways.

When staff listen to this kind of customer feedback and then convey it to your marketing team, good results naturally follow. GetApp’s Marketing and Sales Alignment Survey found that the top advantages experienced after aligning sales and marketing teams included: receiving more feedback from customers (43%), better implementation of customer feedback (42%), developing clearer customer understanding (41%), and creating a single customer journey (29%).**

By better implementing customer feedback in this way, you may discover that customers want more flexible fulfillment options. In response to this need, you can incorporate the right eCommerce and shipping solutions into your tech stack. These solutions can ensure that customers are receiving their products promptly (and to their preference) and can help you stay ahead of any inventory or shipping errors that could result in a negative customer experience.

Small businesses should also keep in mind that they aren’t just competing with other SMBs for quick shipping, but giant retailers like Amazon and Walmart who have made fast shipping a mainstay.

4. Amplify your customer service success

Once you’ve taken initial action and understand the benefits of delivering the best customer service experience possible, the final step is amplifying those wins to bring in even more customers.

Generating and sharing positive reviews is straightforward with reputation management software. These solutions can help good reviews rank higher in search engine results so more consumers can see (and trust) your good work.

These tools can give you an overall, holistic view of your reviews and how they are being received and can keep an eye on your competition to see what consumers are liking (or disliking), specifically.

By using customer service and marketing technology, you streamline the process of combining the two into a unified strategy. For instance, you can use software to collect, organize, and share customer feedback and ratings. Then, you can integrate that data into your marketing software, forming a direct link between customer input and your brand’s messaging.

Here’s a list of options you can use to start shopping for the most effective software for your organization:

• Customer service software

• All-in-one marketing platforms

• Reputation management software

• Account-based marketing software

Turning customer service into a marketing strategy makes customer satisfaction an inherent part of your public-facing identity. Using this guide, you have the steps you need to leverage customer service in your marketing strategy, as well as a starting point for identifying software resources that can make it easier.