How Customer Service and Marketing Should Collaborate in eCommerce

An e-commerce marketing team always wants to know what's working to drive sales to understand customers better and drive more. In contrast, the customer service team typically gets bombarded with ticket volume - especially when marketing succeeds at driving more sales. This can create a bit of an adversarial relationship between marketing and customer service.

It's possible, though, to supercharge each team by aligning them. By aligning marketing and customer service, both departments can reach goals together.

• The Customer service team can feed the marketing team insights since they have a window into customers' minds.
• Marketing can equip the customer service team to be ready to handle volume spikes, both from a workforce perspective with better forecasting and also from a service perspective by having complete info about a marketing campaign

At HelpFlow, we provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 brands. In addition to handling sales and customer service, we integrate deeply with each client and work closely with their team. Collaborating with marketing is a big part of what we do to maximize marketing and customer service results. This post will talk through a few things you should consider implementing in your own teams.

Align on Marketing Launches

Your marketing team will constantly be launching new campaigns. This creates a challenge for the customer service team if they don't clarify what's being offered in the campaign or, worse if they don't know that the campaign is launching and will drive ticket volume.

Below are a few things to get in place to align customer service and marketing with marketing campaigns:

• Use a Content Calendar - Use a contact calendar within marketing that is shared with the rest of the business. The contact calendar should provide a brief overview of what's being offered, key assets such as products, the timeframe of campaigns, target KPIs, and key points of contact on the marketing team.
• Have Recurring Huddles - a recurring huddle between marketing and customer service is a great way to keep everyone aligned with current and upcoming campaigns. By keeping the content calendar up to date, the teams can use it as the foundation of the meeting to make sure everyone is in sync with what's coming up.

By having a systematic way that marketing and customer service stay aligned, you set the foundation for both teams to supercharge each other's results.

Align Customer Service KPIs with Marketing

Marketing typically has specific KPIs that the customer service team can influence since they interact directly with customers all day long. For example, suppose the marketing team focuses on driving an increase in sales for a specific product line. In that case, the customer service team can look for customer communication opportunities to drive sales.

There are a few ways to drive deeper alignment between marketing and CS:

• Make the KPIs set by marketing clear in the content calendar/campaign brief.
• Discuss past, current, and future campaigns on the marketing/customer service huddle in the context of these metrics. That way, everyone is focused on the same thing.
• Management can create incentives and rewards for driving these metrics on the customer service team. Maybe even a leaderboard to foster a culture of competitive execution on the team.

While marketing will primarily drive sales with some form of traffic and email campaigns, customer service can drive a big chunk of results by aligning their communication efforts with the marketing team's goals.

Get it? 1 + 1 = 3 with Departments Aligned

While you can grow your business by having each department execute well, true scale comes from aligning departments so that 1 + 1 = 3. Aligning customer service and marketing to make both departments more successful. That happens by aligning them on the timing and details of launches, target KPIs, and shared insights from customers.

Want to supercharge your customer service and marketing results?

• We provide 24/7 live chat and customer service teams to over 100 brands. Not only do we provide an amazing experience for your customers, but we'll also turn customer service into a profit center by working closely with your marketing team. Book a no-pitch Strategy Call at HelpFlow.com, and we can walk you through opportunities that you're currently missing in CS. Even if we don't work together, you'll get a ton of value by going through the process.
• Skeptical of the "no-pitch" call? Would it be helpful to dig deeper into our content as a first date rather than go straight to a call? Here are a few posts: Forecasting Customer Service, Predict and Save Abandons with Live Chat, and The Metrics to Manage Customer Service.

Have a question on how to apply this? Don't hesitate to reach out!