Customer Support Software Featured Articles

How well is your marketing department integrated with your customer service department? If yours is like many companies in the market today, you likely haven’t thought about such a question as it veers so far off the path of the traditional marketing or customer service focus. If you truly want to reach your customers with key messages, however, you need to understand what they want to hear.

This is where your customer service department comes in. What better way to capture the voice of the customer than through the channels used to communicate with the customer? You’ve already created the perfect channel through which they can interact. Why not take advantage of this information and use it to your advantage? If you have customer support software in place, you’re already on your way.

A recent blog post on Desk examined the concept of marketing sponsoring the support center. The premise is simple – the customer support center becomes your storefront for customers. In its own way, it becomes another corporate site for the company and a reflection of the business itself. In doing so, it should be used as a marketing channel that allows you to extend the value of your brand in the marketplace, while also growing your business.

This concept is about more than just branding the customer support center. Of course it needs to be clear to customers that the center is an extension of the brand. But instead of just thinking of it as that extension, you need to start considering the opportunity. Yes, there are opportunities to sell more product during the conversation or interaction, but the idea of expanding the business is about leveraging your customer support software so that you’re capturing valuable information.

You have the perfect opportunity to capture customer information and insights and this is really just the beginning. You can also examine trends in user behavior. What are the most common calls? Where are calls generally being routed? What types of calls go through the automated system versus the calls going straight to an agent? Look for key trends and design the management of inbound traffic according to those trends.

At the same time, measure the marketing your customers are responding to. Do they bite off on special offers when presented on a live call or are they more likely to respond to an email? Do they prefer value-added offers or are they more likely to trend toward savings in the form of dollars or percentages? All of this information is readily available through your customer support software if you’ve configured the solution to capture effectively.

The point is that the customer support center is the perfect channel to get the information you need directly from the source. After all, isn’t the customer best qualified to tell you what the customer wants?