Throughout my time as a marketer and an end consumer, I’ve had my fair share of time spent talking to customer support.
Especially with SaaS or technological products.
And my God, the number of times I wanted to put a bullet through my laptop screen is astonishing.
At some point, I started questioning myself:
“It can’t be that hard to do customer support jobs properly, can it?”
Until I realized that bad customer service comes as a consequence of quantifying everything in marketing today and trying to measure its ROI, when some things actually can’t be measured.
But that is a topic for some other time.
Here are some of the common negative things I run into when it comes to customer support that are costing businesses money.
- Using emails such as customersupport@company.com or contact@company.com.
- Untrained customer support agents
- Relying too much on AI for customer support.
- No global customer support team.
- Taking too long to answer customer support questions.
- Etc.
In my opinion, these things hurt your customers and drive them away. You then waste time trying to acquire new customers, only to lose them, too.
Not an ideal place for you to be as a marketer.
Especially today, when it is harder than ever to get customers and stand out.
So how can we fix this? And more importantly, why should we?
There are two theories that come to my mind when I talk with CS or think about how to approach CS from a marketing perspective.
The first one is the good old: "The customer is always right” by Harry Gordon Selfridge.
If you think about it, it really is.
They might not always be. But if you have no customers, you make no money. So keep arguing about whether they're right or not. Let me know how that goes for you.
And second, this is how I see it, I might’ve read it somewhere.
But, if you remember, I talked about Dbrand. I tell everyone about their products. I do free word-of-mouth marketing for them because I like their website copy.
And being polite and having good customer service are ten times easier than writing good copy.
If you know that one thing will create thousands of free marketers who will talk about your company, why not invest in it?
So let me take that list of negative things and show you how you as a marketer can fix or at least influence your team to change to gain free word-of-mouth marketing.
Unprofessional Emails
How many times have you received an email from contact@company.com or support@company.com?
In today’s day and age, where technology, information, and things overload us, people crave human connection and interaction.
I don’t know about you, but when I see an email from those kinds of emails, I immediately say to myself, "Yeah, this is not getting solved fast, or not at all."
On the other hand, when I see an email from someone like peter@company.com, I am like:
“Alright, Peter will help me with this, I am good."
So here is what you can do for good results:
- Change all your company's support email addresses to have a real name and a photo. It gives more credibility and trust.
- The best thing you can do is reserve one that has a name and a picture of your CEO. If you can match his email writing style, you've created the best word-of-mouth marketing channel on the planet.
Train your customer support agents
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to have good English and to know what your product does.
This may not be a common task for marketers. But, you can help your company by writing good feature and benefit descriptions. You could also proofread docs and write scripts for what CS agents can say.
Trust me, it goes a long way.
Stop replying on AI so much
At this point, where is my AI toilet?
People, please, I beg you.
AI is good. I use it too, but you cannot use it for everything.
Just a week ago, I had an interaction with an AI CS agent. Nightmare. The AI got so confused with my problem that I ended up getting confused too, and I knew what I wanted.
It's okay to use it for some repetitive questions. But, always include an option to connect to a real expert.
Hire a global CS team
I mean, this one is pretty straightforward.
If I am in Serbia and your team only works in Australia, I won't stay up until 2 AM to get an answer to my damned question.
And I know what you are all gonna say: “But ask your question, and you will get an answer tomorrow."
That stands, but sometimes you face a burning question, and you know that you need to do the work. So, yeah.
Get a global team!
Fast beats free
This one is also pretty straightforward, and it ties into the last point.
If I am gonna have to wait for hours and hours to get a simple answer to my question, I am gonna get pissed 8 out of 10 times.
Chances are, some answers are not gonna be available on the web or ChatGPT.
Also, people will value your product more if they get solutions fast.
Conclusion
This was not supposed to be this long, but my fingers got carried away.
In today's overstimulated, tech-driven world, customer service is vital. If I had to sum it up, it would be this:
"If you make a sale, you can make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a customer, you can make a fortune." - Jim Rohn.
And trust me, you, as a marketer, can have a big impact on the quality of customer service, even when you think you can’t do anything.
That would be it for today.
See y'all tomorrow, folks.
The Unfiltrd Writer
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