In this article you’ll find out why creating a knowledge base section is precious in this endeavor, how to take advantage of social media, and why marketing and customer support specialists should join forces to create evergreen content. 

We will unravel five tried-and-true hacks that will help organizations build an effective synergy in these departments and develop a thriving business.

How to reach a perfect pairing between customer service and marketing 

Customer service is a key player for any business. In fact, 86% of users will invest more into a product or a service if they’re treated by a support rep to the best extent. 

However, a customer service department tends to operate as a standalone unit. It may be separated from designers, marketers, product managers, and other teams that can make a significant contribution to the overall customer experience.

There are brands that offer stellar customer service and say no to that separation. Their customer support teams integrate with marketing and work hand-in-hand to improve the client’s journey. 

Ultimately, both customer service and marketing teams have a wealth of knowledge: the former interacts with people day by day and knows everything about clients’ needs, interests, and concerns. Yet, the latter often has worthwhile tools and fresh ideas for achieving mutual business goals. 

So, if you’re aiming at an effective synergy between these vital departments in your company, learn five proven ways on how they can come to fruition together.  

– 8 techniques for improving the customer experience

1. Build an active online community 

A community marketing strategy will come in handy to show customers your engagement. 

Provide clients with a place where they can share their knowledge and make their needs known. By creating such a community, everyone involved will notice absolute benefits. So, your brand will receive valuable feedback while customers will feel valued.

Implementing a community marketing presence may result in:

• Customer-focused product development
• Increased unity between clients, customer service, and marketing teams
• Sought-after word-of-mouth

At the end of the day, you will have an open forum packed with specific Q&A and other valuable information. 

As a result, clients have a perfect chance to get to know your brand better and search for their long-awaited solutions instead of waiting for a reply in a live chat, a phone call, or an email.

For instance, Airbnb, a community-driven rental service, gives its like-minded clients a sterling opportunity to discuss everything that’s connected to their places of living.

They can tell each other what makes their homes so special, talk about local sights, or just be grateful for hospitality. This way, Airbnb hits the mark, which positively impacts its brand loyalty.

2. Incorporate a social media approach 

A productive online presence is what any business strives for 95% of users follow a brand on different social media networks, which displays its reach. 

Today you can integrate your product or service with any communication channel, like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. 

Alternatively, you can also incorporate all your social media handles into your virtual business card to keep the engagement tracking process handy. This ensures a seamless connection between your various channels and provides a convenient way for potential clients to stay engaged with your brand.

By doing that, you show that your team is not only ready to lend a helping hand at any time but also demonstrates your engagement with customers. 

As a rule, SMM is in charge of a company’s social media account. It’s marketing experts who develop a profile by posting newsworthy content: videos, images, and polls. But customers can also come to your account in order to get their problems solved. And customer support reps are the best to cope with this task. 

With dozens of social media accounts run by marketing departments, support reps often have no clue what’s happening on clients’ most popular networks. And marketers sometimes lack the knowledge of how to sort things out when customers address them with complaints. 

For instance, a marketing specialist can respond in several ways:

• Non-intervention: Marketing tags a support team and lets them handle all the stuff;
• The cautious approach: Marketing takes a crack at solving an issue themselves, even though they don’t know the solution for sure;
• The team player strategy: Marketing discusses a problem with a customer support department and answers a client with its instructions in mind;
• The fence-sitting approach: Marketing notices a customer’s message but ignores it and doesn’t inform a support team. 

Providing omnichannel customer support is a must today and social media is one of the crucial channels along with traditional chat and email solutions. 

Even if your marketing managers are in charge of social media accounts, arrange fruitful cooperation between them and support reps. For that, you can install any team communication tool to discuss social media cases. 

Plus, consider fine-tuning social media routing in your customer support tool so that service agents fix clients’ issues right from their dashboard.   

A marketing team should stay in the know of what your company’s going through. For instance, if there’s an emergency (your service isn’t working, delivery issues appear, or a site is down), marketing experts should monitor it and address complaints on social media before it’s too late. 

As a workaround, you can also pin a dedicated QR Code on your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram account so that users scan it and be able to contact the team before a situation heats up.

– How to create social media content with high engagement power

3. Focus on customer service in your relationship marketing strategy

As the name implies, relationship marketing is all about creating strong customer connections to a brand and promoting word of mouth. 

This is when support reps can join the game. If clients are satisfied with the help you provide, they’re likely to remain loyal. 

Moreover, customer service agents understand how clients use your products and what challenges they face better than anyone else. So, they can pass this valuable information on to the marketing team. 

Every great strategy starts with a team that loves what it deals with. And building a great squad should be the core of your relationship marketing strategy. That’s why if your customer support department has a positive attitude, and knows what they’re talking about, your clients will understand the value of your services better. 

But hey, who said it should be JUST the agent’s prerogative? The modern audience is no stranger to digging up info on their own (and is good at that!). 

Our point is that customer self-service has already gained momentum. So creating a knowledge base should be at the top of your to-do list when going for this adventure. 

You’d better jump on the hype train and deploy a well-oiled resource hub where all your user guides, tutorials, troubleshooting materials, and product features will be kept and stored smartly. 

Users will thank you for organizing a powerful pool of data that is always at their fingertips! 

4. Create a well-thought-out buyer persona

A buyer persona is a reflection of your target customer. This image helps understand your audience better and makes shaping content, developing a product, and achieving business goals a snap. 

In order to get a full understanding of what makes your customers act, it’s of paramount importance to develop a detailed buyer persona. 

However, in their pursuit to define such personas, many organizations rely only on Google Analytics and some market research data. 

The thing is that they don’t take the human element into account. This is when a customer support team may come into play. 

Support reps understand all the intricacies of a customer’s buying process. They can help your marketing department take advantage of real-life situations that actually lead to a sale. 

– How to Create a Customer Journey Map

To build bridges between marketing and customer service to reach better-quality leads, arrange meetings where you can discuss the following details:

• Who your existing client is: When you’re in the middle of shaping your buyer persona, focus on such key information as age, gender, and business profile. A customer support team knows it for sure as they interact with real people. Having this data from customer support in their arsenal, marketing experts can deal with different clients.

• What questions customer support usually hears from prospects: It may not seem crucial for support agents, but it’s a goldmine for marketers. Questions almost always lead to decisions, especially buying ones. 

• What helps get the job done: Does your team take on manual tasks to simplify the customer’s journey? An internal how-to document won’t go amiss and will reveal a lot about client values and demands. 

• What customers think about your product: When people complain about things that don’t work, it isn’t always bad. Learn from past mistakes and share knowledge with your colleagues. Besides, consider using both positive and negative feedback and let your marketing team process your product or service strengths and prospects’ weak spots.

By using live chat software and interacting with clients in real time, it’ll be a snap for support reps to gather various opinions, reviews, and shape a detailed buyer persona. 

– How to create buyer personas for your business

5. Produce trustworthy content together 

Successful marketers realize the importance of relevant content. But they also understand the need to have a steady flow of ideas for that. 

Even seasoned wordsmiths sometimes struggle to come up with the right and valuable concepts for their audience. This is where your marketing team can save the day. 

As people who are constantly interacting with customers and fixing their problems, a customer support department can be the source of viable content ideas.

To put it in other words, if your service reps provide some authentic examples based on their daily routine, marketing managers can use them as an added bonus. After all, marketers always hold out for creating content that could solve the audience’s issues. 

Initiate talks between customer service and marketing teams. Organize regular meet-ups to brainstorm the types of content you can craft together and what it’ll take to address your clients’ concerns. 

In addition, encourage your employees to bounce around ideas about how-tos, guides, and everything that can be especially helpful for prospects and loyal customers. 

Boost your business with a great customer service

Marketing and customer service teams have so many similarities that you probably haven’t noticed yet. A close touch between these two departments can do wonders for your business. 

That is, you can strike a positive customer experience, boost your brand awareness, and reduce clients’ problem areas. Aligned employees will think fresh ways out to show your company to the best advantage.

Making use of support’s customer focus to generate offbeat content, getting the most out of social media, and studying the user base will bring about increased revenue in the long run.

If you are creating and selling online courses, Coursify.me is the best platform to host your courses and advertise your courses.

By hosting an online course on Coursify.me you personalize the course page with your identity and create links to your social networks, facilitating its dissemination and communication with your students.

Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, Coursify.me is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System (LMS).

– Learning Management System: What is it?

Visit our website, test the platform and find out why we are the best option for you and your customers.

The post 5 Tips to Align Digital Marketing with Customer Service to Boost Your Business appeared first on Blog Coursify.me.

Important retention factor, see some strategies to improve this aspect of your business.

Why is the customer experience important for companies?

Taking care of the customer’s entire experience with the brand, from the first contact to the post-sale, is essential to build customer loyalty.

According to Forbes, “the customer experience is today’s business reference”. It has never been more important to put your customers first.

Satisfied consumers become loyal customers that help increase revenue.

Studies have already shown that people who had better previous experience spent much more compared to those who had a negative one. In other words, having a satisfactory brand experience results in greater customer life value.

– How to retain customers for your online course

At the same time, acquiring a new customer costs 7 times more than maintaining an existing one. Therefore, delivering superior experience becomes a valuable asset for any type of business.

8 techniques for improving the customer experience

The customer journey begins at the point where he interacts with your company for the first time, whether through a website, referral or advertisement. 

Here are eight techniques that you can implement to get the best results during this process and retain your audience.

1. Build an omnichannel strategy 

Building an omnichannel strategy (multi channel) is very important to gather crucial insights about your brand’s interactions with the customer and their behavior throughout the life cycle.

The strategy is based on offering customer service through several sales channels, in an equally cohesive and efficient manner. 

Having a continuous journey across all channels, both online and offline, is the key to providing a consistent customer experience.

This strategy allows consumers to connect with the brand through their favorite channels, being equally served by everyone. 

2. Train your customer service team

Your team is the customer’s first real contact with your brand and, you know, the first impression is what remains. 

As a company, you must have a defined standard that guides customer interaction in order to help your team maintain the level of excellence. 

Conducting regular training programs can help your sales, support and marketing team provide perfect assistance. This is a common practice in companies that strive to maintain a quality standard in the services provided.

– Benefits of Online Corporate Training 

Your teams must have a broad understanding of your business and products, in order to perform their functions effectively.

 Conducting training helps your employees in the following ways:

• Helps to understand customer needs more quickly, facilitating the best solutions to be offered.
• It increases confidence when dealing with the public, responding promptly to their questions.
• With a strong knowledge of the product, they are able to deal with complaints effectively.

Training your team with customer service etiquette, as well as encouraging patience and empathy, helps to promote your brand to future customers and build a strong relationship with current ones. 

3. Harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is one of the most used features to provide an enhanced customer experience. 

The implementation of chatbots, for example, contributes to your omnichannel service strategy.

Chatbots can save up to 30% on customer support costs and speed up response time.  They are the best way to respond to requests in real time, which reduces user frustration.

Other chatbots advantages to improve the customer experience are:

• Online 24 hours, chatbots can answer questions even when your support team is busy or unavailable. 
• Bots can easily collect basic customer details, such as name, email, etc. for further analysis. 
• They are scalable during the busiest hours and offer quality support without missing a single conversation.

However, you cannot leave everything to AI. If there is a complex consultation, there must be a transfer to the human agent for effective resolution. 

In this way, you improve the customer experience with the chatbot by managing frequently asked questions, and leaving your team dealing with more complicated issues.

– 10 Tips To Improve Your Customer Service 

4. Create self-service options 

It is certainly vital to have a support team, but being responsive to your customers’ needs can only take you so far. The solution? Give them the means to become proactive.

People need to be able to find answers to their questions on their own. In fact, most customers expect a company’s website to include self-service options, such as support content, tutorial videos, FAQs, etc. 

Businesses can also invest in knowledge base platforms to create knowledge bases that will help customers access information and find solutions independently.

– Record tutorial videos: tips for getting the best result

Self-service solutions save your company’s time and help customers find the information they need more quickly. 

It also helps to educate the customer and provides the tools they need to solve other similar problems in the future. 

Intuitive self-service options strengthen the brand’s reputation, creating positive interactions with the customer. 

5. Request and listen to feedback 

If you are able to understand your customers’ perception of your brand, you can provide them with better quality service. 

Collecting, analyzing and implementing feedback should be the process for improving the customer experience.

With channels like live chat, social networks or chatbots, you can ask for customer feedback right after each conversation or encourage them to leave a review. This is great to help you understand the level of public satisfaction with your business. 

You can create and pin a QR code to your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account, for example, using a QR code generator. This allows users to quickly scan it and contact the team directly for feedback.

– How to Get More Reviews for Your Business

Still in doubt about how to improve the customer experience by implementing feedback? Here are some answers:

• With feedback and opinions, you guarantee that the final product will meet customer expectations.
• Your company shows that the opinions of its users are valuable, which makes them feel connected to your business. 
• Hearing what they say about your product/service helps to sharpen your sales pitch and provides opportunities for conversions.

Testimonials and reviews are powerful ways to improve the customer experience. 

6. Optimize the customer journey

Considering the entire customer journey is very important to improve your experience. 

Research suggests that customer journeys are significantly more correlated to business results than touch points.

You must map the entire journey to clearly understand the end-to-end experiences that your customers go through. This will help you understand how the interactions at each touch point were, identify gaps and implement improvements.

Identifying problems with a focus on the customer journey allows support teams to plan strategies to reduce friction, improve business relationships and increase growth. 

– How to create a Customer Journey Map

7. Appreciate who makes your business grow

One of the most important parts of building strong customer relationships is making them part of your community.

People feel valued when you include them in your team and give credit for your success. 

You can recognize this contribution to the company’s growth in the following ways:

• Reward your loyal customers: give them a reason to recommend you to friends, offering discounts or gifts to who indicates your business to a potential lead.
• Offer exclusivity: you can provide early access to a newly launched product or exclusive offers.
• Offer discounts to customers who spend a lot: cut price to customers when they reach a specific spending goal.

A good loyalty program is another excellent way to please your customer and generate recurring income for your business.  

– Recurring revenue: benefits for your online course

In order to improve the customer experience and increase ROI, companies have expanded their loyalty rewards to incorporate social and behavioral actions, such as referral rewards and points for user-generated content.

– 5 steps to create a loyalty program

8. Always analyze 

Every successful entrepreneur knows the power of analysis tools and their ability to improve sales.

Providing a great customer experience is difficult and linking it to tangible business results is even more so.

To quantify the customer experience, you first need to create a unique view of them, as they interact with your brand across all channels and over time.

To achieve this unified vision and provide personalized consumer experiences, making use of customer analysis is essential for behavior-oriented engagement.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence and big data, companies can easily collect customer analyzes and, from them, determine detailed behavioral, demographic and customer experience metrics in real time.

Prioritize your customer and sell more

It is clear that striving for the customer experience offers great opportunities that directly affect the performance of your business. 

With the right strategy in place, you make your organization customer-centric and reap long-term benefits. Thus, your online course can become a stable and recurring source of income in a short time.

– How to sell online course

Complete eLearning platform, Coursify.me is the ideal solution for anyone who wants to create, sell and advertise courses on the internet.

Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, Coursify.me is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System (LMS).

– Learning Management System: What is it?

This means that you do not need to invest in building your own website. The Coursify.me is ready for you enter your course and create a sales page completely customized for your business.

Visit our website, test the platform and find out why we are the best option for you and your customers.

The post 8 Proven techniques to improve the customer experience  appeared first on Blog Coursify.me.

Take a break and think: What are the most important things you can do in customer support that will really affect your profitability and keep your entire team healthy and productive?

Customer Service: 10 Key Techniques for Attracting and Retaining Consumers

Believe it or not, Brazil, a country known for its friendly, cheerful people, was second to last in a ranking on customer service that started with a smile. 

A survey by Swedish company Better Business World Wide, entitled “Smiling Report“, has revealed alarming data on the quality of customer service in Brazil.

With 1.7 million evaluations made in 69 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America, it was found that the Brazilian seller is one of the least friendly in the world, behind only Japan. 

– How to build customer loyalty

But let’s face it, not only Brazil has this problem. It’s quite common to see bad mood people behind counters. 

To change that, you need to consider the cumulative experience your customers have when they visit your store or website, what they think and feel, and what you can do to make this experience the best it can be.

Check out 10 simple to implement guidelines that can take your customer service to the next level.

1. Automate processes

Customer service providers know one thing: questions are constantly being repeated.

Most of the time, your customers come to you with a problem or question you’ve heard before and will probably hear again .. and again … and again …

Let’s say your support team spends four hours a week on repetitive tasks (probably more, but we don’t want to scare anyone).

By spending a few hours setting up automation in the support process and eliminating these tasks, you can save each person on your team more than 200 hours a year.

For a team of three agents, this is more than an extra 600 hours a year. That’s 600 hours your support team can spend on specific cases, improving and building meaningful relationships with customers.

The top three automations that can save you time, money and your sanity are:

• FAQ 
• Sending Automated Responses to Common Questions
• Product / Service Use Guide

Setting up these three things can be hard work, but once done, they can eliminate many repetitive tasks in your support process.

However, when it comes to automation, there is something very important to keep in mind: In customer service, you should only automate processes, not relationships.

Relationships are a deeply human thing, and trying to automate this part of your customer service can easily cause people to lose interest in your business.

Automate possible processes and let your team spend valuable time building a better relationship with your customers.

This approach not only enhances customer experiences but also helps improve call center efficiency by allowing agents to focus on more complex, value-adding tasks.

Implementing advanced call center software that integrates these automation features can significantly streamline your support processes, making it easier to manage high volumes of inquiries while maintaining a personal touch with your customers.

2. Personalization is everything 

A personalized service aims to make your customer feel as if he is doing business with a real human being, not a faceless company.

Why is it important?

Because when your customers feel they are being listened to and considered, they become better customers, which is a win for both sides.

There are many ways to make customer service more personal, such as:  

• Using names (theirs and yours);
• Send personalized “thank you” gestures;
• Know the client record with your company.

Offering “personal service” is an important and valuable concept that can help you increase retention and grow your business.

Delivering personalized support is not very difficult and can mean very positive results for your company.

– 5 Steps to Building a Loyalty Customer Program

3. Keep an eye on ROI and Support Metrics

There are two things you should always be paying attention to: your support metrics and the actual ROI of your support processes.

Metrics help you get a clear picture of how you’re really doing and make sure you have all the information you need to react quickly if things start to go wrong.

It’s also very important to measure return on investment (ROI) in support for two main reasons:

1. Positive customer experience drives sales, so if you figure out how you can improve it, your sales are likely to increase.  
2. Customer service is often overlooked and overwhelmed, and proving the value in investing in it can change that.

It can be challenging to establish strict support service metrics for the first time. However, what is measured improves.

– Learn how to use NPS to evaluate your online course performance

4. Use positive language

Positive language is a great way to avoid accidental conflicts generated by miscommunication. While the change is subtle, the effects are drastic.

Let’s say the launch of the new module of your online course will be delayed by one month and you need to pass this information on to students who have already purchased the course. Consider the following answers:

• Negative language: “The new module will not be released this month. There is no precise date for its release, I will give you more information soon.”
• Positive language: “The new module will be available soon. I am working hard to deliver the best material possible. Wait for something very good to come! ”. 

– To do list to create online courses

Redirecting communication from negative to positive places, focus the convrsation on the solution.

When the result is the star of the conversation, it reduces the chances of customers getting upset.

– How to improve communication with students

5. Proactivity is crucial 

The time when offering a decent price was enough to differentiate your business from the competition it’s definitely gone.

Now, in addition to a great product at an affordable price, the consumer also demands excellent customer service.

A big part of this excellence is putting out fires before they even start. Smart companies are ahead of problems by providing customer service proactive, rather than reactive.

A proactive support service anticipates the needs of its customers and maintains regular communication with them to identify any emerging issues.

A vital component of proactive customer service is the willingness to ask for feedback; not only when you are solving a problem, but also when positive interactions occur.

Implementing an efficient customer feedback system is crucial for capturing, analyzing, and acting upon this valuable input quickly.

6. Know how to end a conversation

Every time you are finishing a call, think of the following: You are not closing a sale, you are ending the conversation with a customer.

Leaving an issue unresolved creates unnecessary problems. 

Surveys show that only 4% of dissatisfied customers will speak up. That is, not everyone will communicate what is bothering them and it happens often because you have not made it clear that you care.

Your willingness to close a conversation correctly shows the customer three important things:

• You worry about getting it right.
• You are willing to continue until you get it right.
• You want the customer to feel satisfied.

“Is there anything else I can do for you today? I’m happy to help! “Always look for small opportunities like this.

Train your team so that everyone always strives to get to the point where the customer says, “Yes, that’s ok!”.

7. Ask for feedback

When it comes to feedback, we’re not talking about bug reports, which is nothing more than a customer saying “this product or service I’m paying for isn’t working.”

This is not feedback, it’s an emergency that needs to be fixed.

Here we are talking about the kind of feedback that will help you develop your product to its fullest, we’re talking about feature requests.

If you create online courses, you’ve probably been through this, like some students asking for extra material, a video lesson, things like that. God knows that here at Coursify.me our support team gets daily the most diverse requirements.

In general, a feature request is when a client contacts you asking to create a new feature that he would very much like to use. 

Of course it’s not always possible to fulfill all requests, some can be really mind-boggling, but make a list of what’s feasible to do and respond to your customers by thanking them for the suggestion, explaining that it will be considered by the development team, and once you have more solid position, you will get in touch.

If you start looking at trends in these requests, you can make your product or service exactly what your customers want.

– How to get more Reviews to sell Online Courses

8. Turn mistakes into opportunities

Delivering good customer service does not mean that you will be able to eliminate all errors.

Unforeseen failures will still happen, but you can take the opportunity created by a mistake to improve the customer relationship.

Disney, known for its excellent customer support, has a great approach to service recovery. 

It’s a five-step process, easily remembered with the acronym HEARD:

• Hear
• Empathize
• Apologize 
• Resolve
• Diagnose  

Following all these steps will help you turn a mistake into a new opportunity to win a client.

It’s easy to let angry consumers out the door and sometimes they’ll leave anyway, no matter what you do to try to keep them.

But successful companies know that  recovery services is one of the most important elements in customer retention.

9. Put your efforts on the channels that work for you

Companies that offer excellent customer service do so on the channels where their customers are.

If your audience is a regular email user, you’ll need to provide great email support to keep them happy.

– How to Use MailChimp to Create Email Campaigns 

If they are more active on Twitter, you will need to be accessible there.

The same goes for all channels, whether social or personal, such as email and phone.

There are probably more ways to communicate and relate to the consumer than you think. What you need to do is find out which channels work for your audience.

10. “Fire” bad customers

The overwhelming majority of customers are polite and have genuine questions, or point out problems that you really need to solve. 

These customers drive the work and when they succeed with your product or service, you feel the victory is yours too.

But among them there are always some rotten apples.

Those who constantly come up with huge and completely unreasonable requests, abuse your staff, ask for discounts every five seconds, and try to blackmail you with negative reviews.

These customers are eroding your team, costing time and money, ruining your reputation and disrupting the satisfaction of your good buyers.

There is a way to deal with these people: End the call, you don’t have to put up with it.

Politely inform that you do not have the solution they are looking for, on the terms they are looking for and therefore can no longer help them.

This will give you peace and time to focus on who really deserves attention and can positively impact your business.

Engaging customers and helping them make the most of your product will give them a reason to come back and tell others why they love your business.

So, focus on customer service, build rapport with your potential leads and who is already your student, and slowly see your online school grow and solidify.

– How to sell online course

Complete eLearning platform, Coursify.me is the ideal solution for anyone who wants to create, sell and advertise courses on the internet without having to invest to start their own business.

Serving businesses and professionals in more than 60 countries, Coursify.me is a dynamic and customizable Learning Management System (LMS).

– Learning Management System: What is it?

Coursify.me offers three plan options for you to decide which best suits your needs and the good news is that the Beginner Plan is free!

To learn more, visit our website, test the platform and understand why we are the best choice for your online course.

The post 10 Tips for Improving Your Customer Service appeared first on Blog Coursify.me.