Customer service principles in digital marketing strategy, One of the key messages of this is that digital is an integrated part of your strategy and must not be a separate silo within your business. That principle does not apply anywhere more than with customer service. Whether your customers are coming to you with questions or with complaints they will expect to be treated well and served quickly by experts – at this stage more than any other.
Within your digital strategy you have opportunities to talk directly with customers through social media, which is now an expectation of many consumers. You are able to provide real-time online help and information and all without the need for the consumer to go through a phone system. This is no longer an add-on to a customer service strategy, but is an essential part of it.
In order to understand how to achieve this within the digital arena we first need to understand how to achieve the best possible customer service levels and to do this we will review the key service principles
Understand your customer
We have discussed throughout the book how important it is to understand the consumer and your customers. This primarily involves research, insight and analytics, which together give you a broad mix of data and direct feedback to shape your strategy. Part of this data must be understanding the views and opinions of your customers. This can be broken down into two core areas: trends and individual customers.
Trends
Trends give us a broad view of the common issues that customers experience and can also show us where we have been doing a great job. Analyzing your data to understand how customers are behaving at key touchpoints and what feedback is being received via your call centre, service e-mail or other communication method is crucial to understanding the trends. Only by finding the common factors that your customers are struggling with will you be able to prioritize the work and truly understand how to help them.
Trends can come from your data, for example you may find that customers from Germany are struggling to pay their annual fee online as they are dropping out of the funnel at a very high rate on the payment screen. This could be due to a technical error on the German version of your website or it could be that German consumers do not use credit cards as widely as your UK customers and so you need to offer another payment method. Seeing this trend can enable you to tackle it and improve your customer satisfaction levels.
Trends can also arise directly from your customers’ feedback. This may be through any of the open communication channels such as e-mail or social media. Looking for the common themes here can be harder than through data analytics, but by understanding what the trending areas of complaint are you can focus your efforts towards those.
Individual customers
Whilst trend analysis is important, it is also vitally important to demonstrate an understanding of each customer individually and this is increasingly becoming an expectation rather than simply a desire of customers.
Ensuring your systems allow you to know your customer is a challenge that large businesses have always faced, as knowing each individual customer personally is impossible when operating at scale. There are many software solutions that store all conversations and interactions in one place with features such as complaint monitoring, known issue management, knowledge base and social media integration. These features can be very powerful when used in conjunction with a customer database.
Ultimately, understanding your customer is the most important stage in delivering excellent customer service.
Responsiveness
One area of frustration for customers that has increased significantly in the digital age is the time taken for organizations to respond. Consumers are less patient than they used to be and have higher expectations when it comes to response. No longer do we need to follow the lengthy process of sending a letter, ie:
- write a letter;
- take it to a nearby postbox;
- assume that it arrives within the following few days;
- hope it is effectively sorted by the company’s mail team and arrives in someone’s in-tray;
- wait for them to write back;
- sit at home checking the post for a reply every morning.
And yet this was the scenario only perhaps 20 years ago. We know that we can receive instant responses from our friends, some businesses and even directly from celebrities on social media. We know that e-mails arrive almost instantly and that websites can respond in real time. So why would it be reasonable to accept a business taking 48 or even 24 hours to acknowledge or respond to your message? You need to be prepared to structure your business to enable fast response and therefore meet the demands of your customers.
There are a number of ways that we can at least acknowledge a message straight away and be proactive in responding to our customers. A quick response with an appropriate and, where possible, personalized message can make the difference between dealing with a simple complaint quickly and it escalating into a serious issue.
Transparency
Another area that has continued to face increasing scrutiny in the 21st century is transparency or, put another way, openness. In the 20th century it was largely accepted that organizations conducted their business in the way that was necessary to provide their services and products to the consumer. However, a number of scandals in the early 21st century including hacking, data leaks, corruption and the global recession of 2008 have led consumers to become more savvy. Also the increase of challenger start-ups that lead with consumer-centric messaging and peer-to-peer businesses has also given the consumer more power and a desire to drive the behaviours they want to see from organizations.
Transparency is something that ethical businesses will be looking to operate with wherever appropriate and possible, but it should always be a core principle of customer service. Hiding anything from a customer is likely to be discovered now more than ever and so an open and honest approach is always a sensible path to follow. Consumers are more cynical than ever and a great deal of information on businesses such as turnover and management teams is available online. When something goes wrong it is often quickly publicized and can even go viral.
Empathy
The tone of voice used in marketing communications is an essential part of delivering on the principle of empathy. A tone of voice is the way in which you write, speak and generally communicate. This could be formal, business language or casual, conversational language for example. This should be driven from your brand and must be consistent across your organization. You should not speak very differently to your customers than you do to your prospects, although there may be some slightly different changes in language and approach. To explain this, given below is an example of how tone may differ.
Company customer service tone of voice
- A friendly, conversational tone: ‘We’re sorry you didn’t love your experience. We’re going to return your money right away.’
- A formal tone: ‘Apologies that your experience was sub-standard. Your account will be refunded within the next 24 hours.’
Your tone of voice, similar to your strategy, must begin with your values. It is the voice of your brand and so must be completely integrated with your visuals, messaging and other brand elements. Your tone comes through such important elements as vocabulary, humour and storytelling. It can be more powerful than many people would imagine. Your tone of voice can build trust and demonstrate understanding. It can be a key factor in creating advocacy, as some consumers will feel that you speak like one of their friends – and how you say things resonates with them.
There are also some key areas to consider with your tone of voice, including:
- Are colloquialisms or use of slang appropriate for your brand? These may make your brand a little more funky but may also leave some consumers feeling you are too casual to be respected.
- Is it appropriate to use jargon to demonstrate expertise and therefore create trust or will it alienate and confuse? If too much jargon will confuse then will too little be patronizing?
- Profanity is too much for most brands but can be used in some circumstances. Tread very carefully here but it should still be considered.
Decide how correct you want your language to be. For example, if you are writing in English are you willing to split an infinitive? Are you willing to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘However’. These techniques break English language rules but can be powerful in marketing copy.
An example of a business with a tone of voice that is widely liked is the drinks company Innocent. Their tone is simple and conversational and it feels, to their target audience, to be friendly and relatable. It is also positive and aspirational, which helps to create a nice feeling around the products, ultimately aimed at people who are likely to want a healthy, ethical, happy life.
Empathy itself is vital as a customer who does not feel that you understand them (even if you do) will become frustrated. The line here is in showing that you understand the customer and can empathize with their position but ensuring that you do not go so far as to agree with any views that may show your business to have been negligent or not to have operated according to the customer’s best interest. There may be extreme cases where this is true, but admitting this in a customer service environment can lead to escalation of an otherwise relatively minor issue.
Knowledge
This area is very different from knowing your customer. Knowledge in this sense is related to knowing your business and so looking inwards rather than out. Another frustration that customers can have when speaking to your agents or using your website for help is that the knowledge isn’t there. Needing help with a product or service can be frustrating and speaking to someone at the company, either on the phone or digitally, can exacerbate the issue if they do not know more than you do. Therefore, ensuring your online information is up to date and correct is vital as is ensuring that all staff are experts in the field they are responding to.
Consistency
We have all experienced issues where we phone a company and speak to a department that gives us an answer and then redirects us to another department that gives us a completely different answer; perhaps even the same person in the same department giving us different answers on different days. This can seem like being stuck in an endless loop and be extremely frustrating. It is important that your service approach, language, training, documentation, service levels, systems and all other factors are aligned into one consistent approach no matter what the channel. Taking a channel agnostic approach is essential as it ensures that you put the customer and the process before the channel and not vice versa. In order to achieve this you will need to review your business’s brand guidelines alongside any service principles you may have in place. Where there are none it is important to build a set of processes and procedures that create consistency across your service touchpoints. You will need to set your tone of voice, your processes for handling certain types of calls, your systems used for decision making and record keeping.
Integration
Integrating your customer service with your broader business is crucial. This also includes integrating your digital service with your broader service. It can be tempting to buy some new customer support software and integrate it into one area of your business to show everyone else what is possible. Whilst this can be a good technique for creating competition and therefore raising the game of other departments, it can create a disconnect for customers as they receive very different levels of service in very different areas of your business, which again can cause frustration. Integrating into your existing systems is of course also a practical process in terms of cost and efficiency savings. Dependent on the age and complexity of your systems you may find that integrating can cost millions of dollars and so building in sections may be unavoidable. It may also take several years to complete this type of project.
Relevance (eg channel)
Finally, relevance is important. Forcing a customer to talk to you via a specific channel, because you have just launched that channel and want to prove that it works, is not a sensible strategy. Pushing customers through a process that they do not want to follow, in order to hit certain targets, can also be counter-intuitive. Ensuring that your customers have a choice of channels to use and can therefore contact you through the method that they wish will be far more productive and create better and faster resolutions. It is worth adding a note here that, although the above principle is true, it can create significant cost savings to have a purely digital customer service process and remove or significantly reduce call-centre service if this is appropriate for your customers. This model is fairly common today and, whilst it can cause frustration for some customers, it can be an entirely valid strategy if implemented correctly.