In the realm of e-commerce, effective customer marketing collaboration is essential. The marketing team is keen to identify strategies that successfully drive sales and enhance customer understanding. However, this surge in sales often leads to an increased volume of customer service tickets. It’s crucial for both teams to work together harmoniously, rather than competitively, to ensure that customer satisfaction remains high even as sales continue to grow.

It's possible, though, to supercharge each team by aligning them. By aligning marketing and customer service, both departments can reach goals together.

• The Customer service team can feed the marketing team insights since they have a window into customers' minds.
• Marketing can equip the customer service team to be ready to handle volume spikes, both from a workforce perspective with better forecasting and also from a service perspective by having complete info about a marketing campaign

At HelpFlow, we provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 brands. In addition to handling sales and customer service, we integrate deeply with each client and work closely with their team. Collaborating with marketing is a big part of what we do to maximize marketing and customer service results. This post will talk through a few things you should consider implementing in your own teams.

Customer Marketing Collaboration: Align on Marketing Launches

For a seamless customer marketing collaboration, it’s vital that the marketing team communicates effectively with customer service. As new campaigns roll out, the customer service team must be well-informed about the campaign details to manage the expected increase in inquiries. Clear communication ensures that customer service representatives are prepared to address questions and maintain high-quality support, aligning with the campaign’s objectives and ultimately contributing to a positive customer experience.

Below are a few things to get in place to align customer service and marketing with marketing campaigns:

• Use a Content Calendar - Use a contact calendar within marketing that is shared with the rest of the business. The contact calendar should provide a brief overview of what's being offered, key assets such as products, the timeframe of campaigns, target KPIs, and key points of contact on the marketing team.
• Have Recurring Huddles - a recurring huddle between marketing and customer service is a great way to keep everyone aligned with current and upcoming campaigns. By keeping the content calendar up to date, the teams can use it as the foundation of the meeting to make sure everyone is in sync with what's coming up.

By having a systematic way that marketing and customer service stay aligned, you set the foundation for both teams to supercharge each other's results.

Align Customer Service KPIs with Marketing

In the context of customer marketing collaboration, it’s recognized that the marketing team’s specific KPIs can be directly influenced by the customer service team. Given their constant interaction with customers, customer service representatives are in a prime position to support marketing initiatives. For instance, if the marketing team is concentrated on increasing sales for a certain product line, the customer service team can capitalize on their daily customer interactions to identify and create opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, thereby contributing to the overall sales goals.

There are a few ways to drive deeper alignment between marketing and CS:

• Make the KPIs set by marketing clear in the content calendar/campaign brief.
• Discuss past, current, and future campaigns on the marketing/customer service huddle in the context of these metrics. That way, everyone is focused on the same thing.
• Management can create incentives and rewards for driving these metrics on the customer service team. Maybe even a leaderboard to foster a culture of competitive execution on the team.

While marketing will primarily drive sales with some form of traffic and email campaigns, customer service can drive a big chunk of results by aligning their communication efforts with the marketing team's goals.

Get it? 1 + 1 = 3 with Departments Aligned

Achieving business growth often involves each department performing at its best, but to truly scale, fostering customer marketing collaboration is key. This means aligning the customer service and marketing departments to work in concert, enhancing their effectiveness. By coordinating on launch timings, detailing target KPIs, and sharing customer insights, the combined efforts of these departments can produce results greater than the sum of their parts, exemplifying the synergy where 1 + 1 equals 3.

Want to supercharge your customer service and marketing results?

• We provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams to over 100 brands. Not only do we provide an amazing experience for your customers, but we'll also turn customer service into a profit center by working closely with your marketing team. Book a no-pitch Strategy Call at HelpFlow.com, and we can walk you through opportunities that you're currently missing in CS. Even if we don't work together, you'll get a ton of value by going through the process.
• Skeptical of the "no-pitch" call? Would it be helpful to dig deeper into our content as a first date rather than go straight to a call? Here are a few posts: Forecasting Customer Service, Predict and Save Abandons with Live Chat, and The Metrics to Manage Customer Service.

Have a question on how to apply this? Don't hesitate to reach out!