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If you don’t think marketing and customer support complement each other, I didn’t either—at least not at first. Sure, you can point to the nightmare of problems landing on the plate of Comcast marketing because of the frustrating experiences of their customers. But even for everyday business, the two departments should harmonize more.
What made me a true believer? I can honestly say it’s thanks to our client experience team at Lesson.ly. They’re some of the greatest customer-support folks I've ever met. Each week, we win deals because of how this team treats people. They benefit every team at Lesson.ly, not just marketing. Specifically though, I want to share some practical ideas so that you can more intentionally leverage the strengths of your marketing and support to improve both.
There’s a primary theme running through these ideas: cross-functional communication. More than any other individual or department, your customer support team owns the best understanding of your customers, their needs, their wants, what they love, and what they hate. So, talk with them, learn from their experiences, and leverage that knowledge in your messaging.
You can integrate marketing with your CS team best by working with them to develop buyer personas. These ideal customer profiles should never be static. Instead, they should evolve over time as your business changes. Your customer support team can articulate the changes in the customers who have the highest likelihood of renewing or creating revenue expansion opportunities. Dig into these customer trends with the support team and identify the common characteristics so that you know which types to attract more of for better long-term revenue growth.
Quick note here: Remember that the losses tell you just as much as the wins. We collaborate on understanding the customers we should attract as well as the ones we should avoid. We call the latter "anti-personas."
Whether you’re selling software, shoes, or square feet, talking through product updates with your customer team will enrich your public communication about your product. By talking with your support team, you can better understand how people react to changes, which features you should highlight over others, and which value props carry the most impact. I highly recommend taking time to consult with your customer team before each product marketing-related activity— it will be well worth it.
This is probably the most tangible idea I’ll give you today: Leverage your customer team during the process of creating the FAQs section of your website. Obviously, you should identify the questions that come up in the sales process as objections so that you can provide the official company response to them, but I recommend including questions that represent the most frequently discussed topics post-sale as well. Without input from the support team, we marketers are just guessing. And once built, an FAQs section can save your support team time from repeating themselves.
Great case studies and client testimonials can come only from your customer-facing teams. We work hard to make sure we’re measuring the pulse of our most successful customers and how they fit into our messaging. Rather than relying on marketing team members to interview individuals on the client experience team, our success team creates regular “client highlights.” These look like brief case studies for internal use so that we can better understand how our customers are winning with Lesson.ly. Marketing takes these stories and incorporates them into our communication strategies.
If you have a great support team, flaunt it. Make it very publicly known how much they truly help your customers, highlight each of them individually, including their personalities and their passion for what they do. For example, I love to talk about how our team’s average response time to a request is 3 minutes! Can you believe that? That even includes nights and weekends, so during the week it’s even faster.
I hope these ideas stirred some thought on ways your company can connect your marketing and support teams better. Was I successful? Please share your feedback on these tips and any ideas you’ve seen work well in the comments below.
Mitch Causey is the Director of Marketing at Lesson.ly, the easy learning software.Lesson.ly helps companies like Lyft, Angie’s List, and ModCloth improve their employee learning programs by allowing them to build, share, and track their materials all in one place.
