How Customer Service Is Now Your Vital Marketing Tool

One of the biggest tools in your marketing arsenal is right under your nose. It’s your customer service approach. It’s time to take the customer service staff, or the “complaint desk,” as it was once called, out of the back office and put it front and center. 

The way you interact with your customers is now as public as any of your paid advertising and marketing efforts. You can thank the online world for that. Blogs and social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp give your customers a platform to tell everyone about how well or how badly you served them or, more commonly, how you ignored them.

Customer service as marketing is more than entry-level staffers being friendly toward grumpy customers. It is a matter of making it easy for people to interact with your business and solving any problem or discrepancy quickly and efficiently.

Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, understands how customer service translates to marketing. He goes by the title of customer service representative because, he will say to anyone who asks, it is the most crucial job in any company. He says that by serving customers, a business owner can learn what it is that will make that business more useful to all of its customers.

Listening to consumers and having a direct dialogue with them is one of the purest forms of marketing, agrees Matt Rhodes, client services director at social media agency FreshNetworks. He points out that it is now easier and less expensive to give people good customer service, “and, perhaps more importantly, be seen to give it,” he said. “Answering somebody's query on Twitter or on an online forum, commenting on a blog or in an online community answers one query, but it also shares the information for others to find.”

Talk about efficient problem solving.

But before you respond to questions and criticisms in a social forum, you need to identify your communication style and be able talk to people in a language they can understand.

Here are a few other practices that can elevate your customer service to top-notch marketing. They come courtesy of Jackie Huba, co-author of Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message (Kaplan Business, 2006):

• Include your phone number: Make sure it is on all your materials so people can reach you at any time in the process. It builds a sense of security.
• Apologize convincingly: The online discount service Groupon was dismayed when a merchant went out of business after hundreds of coupons were sold. To make amends, Groupon sent a picture of its staff holding a sign that said "We're sorry," along with a refund to all of the customers who had purchased a coupon.
• Have an iron-clad guarantee: Print your policy on all materials and say it whenever you can. Whether it offers customers a refund or service redos, make sure it is stated early and often. Don’t promise more than you can, but do let people know what you will offer if there is any reason you can’t fulfill your agreed service. It reinforces a feeling of trust, and companies say only small numbers of people actually ask for refunds.

What to avoid like the plague? Those scripts that tell people they are valuable to your business, followed by a litany of reasons you can’t help them. In fact, in today’s connected world, it’s best to forget scripts altogether. People have heard it all before, and you are only giving them ammunition to mock you instead of classy service they can brag about to their friends and the online world at large.