Customer care will make or break a company- maybe not overnight, but it surely will reflect itself over time. Have you considered that customer care could double as your most effective marketing campaign?
A company known for bad customer service will never be able to counteract that bad reputation with a sleek marketing campaign. An Ovum survey said that 76% of customers would stop doing business with a brand after a single bad experience.
Take a look at the airplane operator Ryanair for an example. This European company is well-known for its bad customer service. Most people, many of whom have never flown with them, are aware of them simply because of how horrible their customer service is.
And they have never been able to shake off that reputation.
Whether you’re an established company or just starting out, customer care is something that can make or break you. This guide is going to show you why customer care is your biggest marketing draw and how to improve on it.
Marketing Is A Relationship
A marketer from the 1970s may tell you that marketing is all about making the sale and closing the deal. A marketing campaign is a direct way of increasing your revenues. On the other hand, ask a marketer from today and they will tell you what marketing is really about.
Marketing is about creating a relationship with a customer. Only when that relationship has been established will a purchase actually happen.
People care more and more about what a company does and what a company stands for. They do care about how you treat people and what you are doing with your profits. If you are found lacking in any of these areas by a customer, you will find it extremely difficult to make a sale.
Everyone Remembers A Bad Experience
It may not be fair and it may not be right, but you can have a hundred good experiences with someone yet the one experience that will standout is the one bad one. There is very little room for error in both customer care and marketing.
Someone who has a bad experience will tell their family and friends about it. Word of mouth marketing has come back to bite you in the worst possible way.
Good customer care creates a memory that can’t be replicated by any other form of marketing campaign. It’s a human treating another human right. It’s another person, not the company speaking to the customer, and that’s why it’s so powerful.
The Message You Need To Send
With customer service being so critical to marketing, you need to send a message to your customer service team. Previously, you may have half-heartedly said that you need to treat customers right. But now you have to go out of your way to make sure that they understand a bad experience isn’t acceptable.
Invest more into hiring the right customer service operatives. This may have been seen as a relatively low skilled part of your company, but now it should be held in the same regard as your product development team.
How Do You Get More From Your Customer Service Team?
Hire The Right People – It goes without saying that without the right people you are never going to get the results you want.
Explain Why – Often people don’t understand why you are so concerned about customer service. Explain to them the importance of treating customers right and how it impacts the future of the company.
Provide Incentives – When someone does a good job with a customer, you should go out of your way to praise them for it. Make sure that they know they have done a good job.
Repairing Your Reputation
Sometimes things can and do go wrong. It’s like any form of marketing and there’s nothing you can do about this. But the important thing is how you react to a customer service error. Don’t allow the problem to fester and don’t pretend it never happened. Go out of your way to solve it.
First of all, be willing to apologize for any mistakes you’ve made. Then offer some form of gift. It could be a discount or a complimentary product or service. It won’t make them forget about what happened, but it demonstrates that you care.
It’s always good to go out of your way to do your best by your customers. What you may not have known is that customer service is your most powerful form of marketing. With all this in mind, you need to place an emphasis on customer service.
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Find the article in it’s entirety and original form on Forbes here, and be sure to follow the author, AJ Agrawal, on Twitter at @ajalumnify.