Hey Marketers, It’s Time to Log In

We all know that the voice of the customer (VoC) is more important than ever. After all, according to a report from Five9, 40% of consumers will stop doing business with a company after just one bad experience with customer support. What’s more, a whopping 95% will tell someone else about it afterward — and word of mouth is everything.

While customer support is not marketing and you might be thinking that improving the customer service touch point is up to your support team, the fact is that ensuring your customers are having a good experience with your brand is everyone’s job. It’s even more true for those of us in marketing, as it’s our responsibility to ensure that the story we tell potential customers is aligned with reality, which, more often than marketers would like to admit, is not always the case.

Luckily, your business’s most comprehensive store of customer feedback is collected and managed every day via your customer service software. So, when was the last time you logged into your company’s help desk?

Why marketers should spend time in the queue

There is a lot you can find out when talking to (or even just reading messages from) customers: What they think of your product or service; how they feel about your brand; where they’re located; how they prefer to communicate; even whether or not they have kids or pets!

Having access to that kind of context is so useful to us as marketers. It would be impossible to dive into every way it can benefit our work, so I want to just focus on three benefits that come from marketing teams spending time in the queue: better messaging, increased value add and retention opportunities, and a greater sense of empathy.

Better messaging

One thing that I found frustrating when working in support at other companies was that the people making decisions about how to message our products often had little to no contact with our customers. This meant that they didn’t understand where the customer was coming from and their messaging often fell flat or, worse yet, inflamed existing pain points, leaving it to us, the customer service team, to smooth things over.

At Help Scout, we try to avoid this type of disconnect through whole company support (WCS), a program where every person in the company, from the newest hire to our CEO, spends time working with real customers. Our VP of Marketing, Kristen Bryant Smith, is a huge proponent of the program, which is one reason our team recently switched from a quarterly to monthly WCS cadence.

I think that it's really important for a few reasons. The first is around messaging — things like whether or not our value proposition landed or if there's alignment between the way that we talk about the product on the website and what the experience is for customers.

If we have new users who are confused about a feature or they thought that they were going to get one thing and then they got something totally different, that would be a problem.

Kristen Bryant Smith

VP of Marketing

Kristen believes that we shouldn’t be relying on other teams to provide that insight and that working directly with customers is vital to ensuring that we truly understand who our customers are and how we can help them do their best work.

While some might argue that you don’t need to spend time answering customer questions to get that insight — after all, there are many companies that will do this research for you — I might counter with the fact that not everyone has those resources. Whole company support is accessible to everyone.

It’s a point that Jacalyn Beales of Copy.ai touched on when she participated in one of our Conversation Corner webinars last year:

Opportunities to add value and delight

Of course, being hands-on with customers doesn’t only help you write better messaging; it can also create room to nurture relationships by delivering more in-depth support to your customers. Service teams have a wealth of knowledge and experience, but marketers do, too!

I recently had the opportunity to connect with Allison Lee, a Growth Marketing Manager at Amplitude. She shared an experience from a previous employer where a big client had written in to support with a question about why an email of theirs wasn’t getting a lot of engagement. Knowing that she might have a little extra insight, customer support brought her into the conversation as a subject matter expert.

Allison knows her stuff, and not only was she able to answer the original question, she was able to go above and beyond that, strengthening the customer’s relationship with her company. You can tell that the customer recognized the real value, too; when renewal time came around, they re-upped.

Allison’s story is a great example of how marketers can step in to help customers in the moment, but those conversations can also spark something bigger. Hillary Noble, Help Scout’s Director of Content, sees the chance to make our customers feel loved and appreciated while also working together toward common goals.

There’s so much opportunity for things like turning a positive conversation or great recommendation from a customer into a mention in our newsletter or blog, especially if it's something that will help other customers in their work. Spending time in the queue also makes it easier to spot openings for broader content partnerships or co-marketing between our businesses.

Hillary Noble

Director of Content

While not every customer interaction is going to result in a partnership, there’s no doubt that getting a response from a marketing pro when you write in to support or getting an unexpected shoutout in your company’s Instagram stories will be something that a customer remembers, appreciates, and tells their friends.

The ability to see things from both sides of the screen

Earlier, I mentioned how when I was in support, I found the disconnect between decision-maker and customer to be frustrating. To make that worse, those same disconnected folks would often tout how important we were while still ignoring our reports from the front line. Recently, Brian Levine, co-founder of the help desk Yetto, expressed a similar frustration.

He wrote on LinkedIn that he was “tired of hearing people outside of the support team talk about how customer support is the backbone of the company” when many companies don’t compensate support teams accordingly and other employees have no idea what their customer service teams even do.

It’s a fair criticism. The fact is that if you want to ensure that your business isn’t just providing lip service to your customer support team, then you’re going to need to get your hands dirty, develop empathy for what their day to day looks like, and better understand how your work and decisions affect theirs.

All companies should do [whole company support]. If they did, none would view support as a pure cost center. It’s also generated a lot of empathy. I did WCS this week and the support team is navigating a lot with our pricing migration. Support is such an important role.

Nicole Roskill

Director of Partnerships

As Nicole pointed out, even when a big change for your company is for the best, it doesn’t necessarily come easily. It’s something our team is facing with our recent change in pricing structure, and seeing the responses coming in from customers has been an important part of our approach to the transition.

As a marketer, it’s your job to go after both positive and negative customer feedback, empathize with any struggles, and think about what you can do to ease the friction. That gained perspective is going to make you a stronger marketer, and, as Hillary points out, it’ll make you a better customer, too:

Support is hard. When you have a better understanding of what goes into that work — expert product and policy knowledge, technological skills, patience, understanding, and often little control over business circumstances — you may find that waiting a few extra minutes on hold really isn’t that big of a deal after all.

Make time to get to know your customers

At Help Scout, we’re bullish when it comes to our view that everyone in a business belongs in the inbox, which is why all of our employees get a login to the platform from day one. Giving our team full reign to learn from and solve customer issues makes our product and business stronger.

Programs like whole company support and the regular practice of reading through consumer conversations are the quickest ROI format for marketing research there is. Knowing that is one of the reasons that we recently decided to make the switch from user-based pricing to a model that provides unlimited users across all plans.

Now you don’t have to work at Help Scout or break the bank to reap the benefits of getting to know your customer — you just need to log in.