The Office US. – like its British predecessor – remains a much-loved sitcom in which miscommunication lies at the heart of almost every episode.
Whether Michael Scott suddenly disappears in the middle of a workday, misinterprets corporate instructions, or misreads Oscar’s accounting reports, chaos ensues.
The video below is case and point.
Much of the comedy stems from this miscommunication, disrupting working harmony, damaging customer satisfaction, and often inhibiting Dunder Mifflin’s retention rates.
Yet, while The Office is only a TV show, many may recognize the problems it throws up – including marketing and service teams.
In real life, however, these issues are not so funny.
Converging Service and Marketing Tech Stacks
Traditionally, brands have viewed marketing and customer service as distinct departments. As such, collaboration has stayed somewhat limited.
Yet, now consumers converse with brands across countless touchpoints, the lines between marketing and customer support have blurred.
For instance, many marketing teams now use contact center sentiment data. In doing so, they can deliver personalized discounts via SMS to happy customers, utilizing that satisfaction to drive increased value.
Such activities highlight how many businesses better understand the connection between marketing activities and contact center conversations.
However, despite some cooperation, miscommunication remains troublesome.
A classic example is when marketing teams send out campaigns without warning the contact center – which then suffers from an unexpected uptick in demand.
There are many antidotes for such niggling issues, which often involve establishing new processes. Nonetheless, tech also plays a significant role.
“Tech stacks with integrated tools and systems for both departments allow for department-wide transparency and communications,” adds Andrea Giacomini, CEO of Mitto.
“When both teams have access to the same information, it creates brand alignment and cohesive interactions across all channels, improving the customer experience.”
With this in mind, consider the following six five technologies and how joint access to each may enable marketing and service teams to deliver better customer outcomes.
1. CRM
In the past, service, sales, and marketing utilized different CRM systems, which siloed data and obstructed a holistic view of the customer journey.
Emphasizing this struggle, Giacomini stated:
“Siloed teams can lead to inconsistent customer experiences, “customer amnesia,” where brands can’t recognize a given customer from one interaction to the next, and a loss of trust.”
As such, more brands are converging their CRM systems to establish a central CX data lake – which each department can pipe into and drink from.
Moreover, marketing and service teams can build cross-function workflows within a CRM.
For instance, agents – perhaps with the help of generative AI – can strip customer feedback from conversations, store that in the CRM, and tag marketing into particularly insightful, relevant cases.
Such feedback may help marketing gain more insights from campaigns, leverage newfound quantitative data, and identify customer advocates with stories to promote.
Moreover, the marketing team can engage with these customer advocates and extract further value from these happy relationships with personalized discounts.
Most CRM platforms leverage email as the main mode of communication from brand to customer, but adding an SMS API integration within a CRM can enhance such a value-adding campaign. SMS has a 98% open-rate compared to only 20% for email. Make sure your customers are actually seeing your content.
2. Conversational Analytics
There are many advantageous conversational analytics initiatives that marketing and service teams can run through, with considerable overlap.
For instance, the technology may help uncover customer journey frictions across touchpoints that marketing controls. By addressing these, the department can bolster CX and reduce failure demand in the contact center.
Another excellent example is predicting customer behavior. Indeed, the tech can highlight customers likely to churn, post-contact center interaction. With this info, marketing may kickstart a proactive omnichannel SMS campaign across email, WhatsApp, and SMS to retain at-risk customers.
However, perhaps the most illuminating cross-function application is detecting the true voice of the customer. Such a use case uncovers strengths for marketing teams to share and weaknesses within the service experience for contact centers to address.
Moreover, by adding that data to individual customer profiles in the CRM – businesses may further aid SMS segmentation initiatives.
3. Social Media
Ideally, service and marketing will share a social suite that gathers data, prioritizes mentions, and enables an escalation process.
Harnessing AI, the suite may tag contacts by importance – perhaps through sentiment categorization – and deliver those to the right team – be it service, marketing, or another department.
Social channels offer a direct pipeline to a brand. Many consumers turn to social media apps to submit feedback or achieve conflict resolution, avoiding long hold times on the phone or delayed responses to emails.
It’s important for modern, customer-centric brands to track these channels closely to provide timely support. Omnichannel support solutions, like Conversations from Mitto, easily enable cross channel monitoring and communication.
Meanwhile, the business may set alerts for trending topics and urgent mentions, offering a unified view of customer experience for all departments to work from.
4. Knowledge Base
Customers often reach out to contact centers to learn more about particular campaigns. Marketing should anticipate those questions and share answers with the service team.
A speech analytics exercise that digs into historical campaigns, detecting the questions customers have previously asked, will help here.
Nonetheless, an email to service leaders with this information is not enough. Together, they must publish answers on the website and collaborate on knowledge articles that offer agents vital info to fall back upon.
It’s also best practice to add an expiry date to these articles so they drop out of the knowledge base when the campaign closes.
Finally, marketing should also have access to the knowledge base, as it may highlight some of the issues that have stemmed from previous activities and classic customer gripes.
The content may also prove invaluable if they ever engage with customers one-to-one.
5. SMS
Both departments will likely leverage SMS separately. Marketing may push out time-sensitive promotions and offers while customer service teams send shipment notifications and inventory availability updates.
Yet, there are many SMS strategies that marketing and service teams can leverage together, with the potential to transform customer experiences.
Sharing an example, Giacomini said:
“Customer service departments can gather feedback via SMS surveys, demonstrating to customers that their opinions matter to brands. Marketers can then use the data collected to develop campaigns that better resonate with consumers.”
Meanwhile, both departments can create SMS templates to optimize productivity. They may also use data and automation tools to personalize such messages in the blink of an eye.
Start Your SMS Omnichannel Journey with Mitto
Brands that unite their marketing and customer support teams can:
- Reduce churn by delivering best-in-class customer service.
- Build stronger customer relationships and cultivate trust through effective communication and seamless interactions.
- Meet—or even exceed—consumer expectations.
A cross-functional omnichannel strategy, leveraging communication channels such as email, SMS, social media, and chat apps, helps to drive each of these outcomes. It also enables hyper-personalized, proactive customer communications, which spur many big benefits.
As Michael Scott may say: “Don’t ever, for any reason, for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been… ever, for any reason whatsoever… ignore the power of digital communications.”
To learn more and engage with omnichannel experts, visit: www.mitto.ch
