Share what you know with millions of people
Focus is the best place to turn what you know into remarkable content
0
How do you differentiate between customer service and marketing?
Of course marketing and customer service are different entities, but I'm curious where you draw the line in terms of investment? How do you define marketing material for the purposes of driving traffic, interest, and retention; and how do you define customer service efforts (automation, customer relationship-building, content, etc.)? Do you view these as linear efforts, or more circular in their relationship to each other?
Events
- Dos and Don'ts of Small Business Marketing May 29 @ 11 am PT
- Lead Nurturing 202: The Next Generation May 31 @ 11 am PT
- The Tricks to Paid Media June 6 @ 11 am PT
- Display Advertising for Brand Awareness June 20 @ 11 am PT
Related Activity
4 Answers
When you are engaging in customer service, you are marketing. Every aspect of your business and every employee in your business is your constant voice/image of that business. They are overlapping and intertwined, but I agree, they are different aspects of this.
You could spend no money on marketing and just use your CS department to do all your product/service info sharing. It's more powerful b/c you have the person one on one with you right there and it's sprouting from an existing conversation that had been ongoing for at least a few minutes - so the repoire has been established, you have their attention and their is more openness to the info by the customer because it's not a blasted marketing piece being thrown across their computer.
I i use to work for a few start up companies that did no advertising or marketing at all (mid to late 90's). Marketing was word of mouth, by us (sales reps) and clients. The company grew quickly and they never implemented it even when they eventually had the money to do advertising/marketing campaigns.
Your investment is better spent on the people you do have already working for you, vs creating a creative piece of literature that 'might' reach your target market.
On a side thought: Ironically, I am just finishing a blog on this topic: If people look at their business in a compartmentalized way, then their business doesn't have a chance of surviving in the 21st century.
As we all know, technology has changed the way we communicate with our customers/potential customers and it has changed the way we obviously do our outreach and marketing too. So the best way to runa business is to view the business as one whole constantly flowing enterprise, not in compartments/departmentts.
These days, there is really only the very fineist line between segments/departments within your organization. Entrepreneurs know this best, as we do everything and don't have a slew of people in one department or another - so we aren't concerned about linear or circular relationships. We just do what has to be done and we test and discover the ways things work for us (or don't) and we keep tweaking that as our business evolves, we gain more skills, and as customer demands and needs change constantly and often instantaneously.
Let's start with some basic definitions (provided mostly by Wikipedia).
Customer Service = activities designated to enhance customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty.
Marketing = process by which companies create interest in goods or services; generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication and business development; integrated process by which companies build strong customer relationships; used to identify customers, keep customers and satisfy customers
Customer service is an essential and necessary part of marketing. In fact, it could be your most beneficial ally in creating the strongest type of marketing out there: word of mouth marketing.
Marketing as a whole involves all the strategies used to identify, target and keep customers. Customer service is one piece of an overall marketing strategy. Like Jaxi said, "Every aspect of your business and every employee in your business is your constant voice/image of that business." Every employee and brand interaction is part of customer service.
While your traditional marketing strategies (ie. advertising campaigns, tradeshow attendance, websites, adwords, etc...) are important to generating consumer interest, I'd place primary focus on customer service, especially as a small business. Customer service can either make you or break you. For instance, I just started managing a franchise GNC whose customer count was down 13%. Not because of lack of marketing or lack of need for the products but strictly due to bad customer service. Word of mouth is your strongest marketing medium and the type of word of mouth marketing you get is in direct relation to your customer service.
If you'd like to know more about the importance of customer service in business success and see quantifiable data to back it up I highly recommend reading "Satisfaction: How Every Great Company Listens to the Voice of the Customer" by Chris Denove and James D. Power IV. Every business owner should own a copy of this book.
Marketing is a macro term. It consists of lot many things. Customer Service is mainly focused on to provide the utmost service to the customer. Marketing imbibes so many activities. like Product positioning , Advertisement, Product Promotion , Sales etc. Marketing is like an umbrella which holds so many strings. Customer service is mainly related to providing the best service ( pre & after sales ) to the customer. Both the activities may look similar & has common objective to create a larger customer base for the organization but has distinct activities in scale & magnitude.
It's a great question and I adopt a slightly different approach. The fact that we have these definitions reflects traditional models of how we view or define what we know as a 'company'. I wonder what it would look like from a customer perspective? Do customers think in terms of customer service, marketing, compliance, business operations? Or do they simply think in terms of the outcome of what they want to achieve? I want to buy something, I want to return something, I want to complain about something. Providing excellent customer service is a form of marketing that may result in a subsequent sale - where or how do you draw the line between the different functions?
Answer This Question