Does Customer Service Impact your Brand's Image?

 What is Customer Service? 

Customer service is the support that a company provides to its customers, after purchasing its products and services. This goes beyond telephonic customer support. In the modern world, there are many ways to practice effective customer service. Customer service has a great role to play in the management of your brand or company’s overall reputation. Let us see how. 

Why is Customer Service Important? 

Customer service plays a crucial role in determining your brand’s image in the market. Apart from their products and services, most B2C brands are known for the experience that they provide to their customers. Marketing may help you target new customers, but customer service and satisfaction set you apart from the competition and retain the existing ones.

Customer Service and Brand Image

The modern consumer values companies with a humanistic approach, and not just a mere corporate. This means that consumers expect their favourite brands to be ‘in touch’ post completing the buyer journey. This can be done through follow-up emails, messages and social media. (Note, most customers do not appreciate phone calls). Great things happen when brands communicate to their customers that their goals go way beyond the marketing of their product or service.

Many times a customer may face issues with your product or service and might want to get it resolved. How will they do it? They can either drop an email or contact customer support through the contact details provided on the website. In most cases, a customer drops numerous emails/forms and receives no response. Not responding to your customers’ queries and interacting with them through various platforms can prove to be detrimental to your brand’s image.

What can be done? 

There is a very real chance that your customers might get demotivated to purchase from you if you fail to address their concerns. So, how do we overcome this? The foolproof and most sustainable solution to this problem is equipping your customer service department. As a customer service professional, make sure you respond to important customer queries as a priority. 

You can respond to customer queries via email, or by replying to customer queries and reviews on your website and social media pages. Alternately, you can address some common concerns on your brand’s social media for engagement. This way, your brand is not only getting marketed but is also fulfilling its customer support goals. 

Added Workload and Responsibilities

Customer service is a tedious job that requires you to be available for your brand and customers. But this does not mean that employees have to stress themselves. Modern consumers value a humanistic approach. the best way to practice this is to inform. Inform your customers through your website or social media that you will be responding to their queries only during work hours. For example- Monday to Friday from 10 am-6 pm. 

You can also opt for automation. The majority of customers have the same set of queries. You can make use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate automated responses to common customer queries. 

Conclusion

Customer service is one of those pillars that support your brand/company. It is important for building a strong foundation for your brand. Effective customer service can reap benefits in your marketing campaigns as well. 

 

Clever Marketing Communication; Skin Care Edition

 

What are we talking about? 

Very often, brands try to use clever communication or messages in their marketing strategies. One such communication you may have come across, coming from brands and companies that deal in health and beauty products is that of 'Results Guaranteed". 

The impact of this communication is very strong and creates a need or desire in the consumer to try the product. The consumer may or may not see the results within the mentioned time period, but the purchase of the product has certainly fulfilled one and many goals of marketers.

To boost their sales further, it was imperative for the marketers to adapt. When marketers got bored of this particular communication, they thought of a new way to pitch to the consumers. By adding numbers and time periods into the communication, brands found a very effective way to sell to their customers.

To Boost Their Sales Further, Marketers had to Make a Change... 

You may have observed brands communicating “Results guaranteed within 90 days” or “For best results, use for 3 months”. Through this communication, the consumer is made to believe that the product will work wonders within the mentioned time period. Knowing this, the consumer is convinced to make a purchase and try the product. Because of this communication, marketers were able to convert leads into sales in lesser time than usual.

Which Communication do you Think Will Have a Better Impact and Why? 

The communication that mentioned “Results in 90 days” will have a better impact on the consumer as compared to the one mentioning "Results in 3 months. Why? Even though 3 months and 90 days mean the same, the word “days” makes the consumer think that a product will show results faster than the product that mentions “Results in 3 months”.

See the impact of marketing strategies and communication on human behaviour?

The "No Marketing" Marketing Gimmick

 What are we talking about? 

You may have observed the brand communication and taglines of many businesses claiming "No Marketing, only service " or "0% Marketing, 100% Trust" while promoting their products and services. But is that true? Or is this just another marketing gimmick? Let's find out. 

Many brands have started to promote their products by using communication that claims that the brand is not intentionally marketing or promoting their product, but is providing a genuine review or feedback that seems to be more believable. Modern consumers are smart and are able to identify the basic marketing tactics. So, marketers needed to come up with something new and quick. 

What did the Marketers do? 

Marketers, through their strategies, tried to convince the consumers that they themselves are against fake marketing and advertising claims. By using taglines and captions like "No Marketing " or "0% Marketing ", the brand is trying to portray that it is against lame marketing tactics and is more concerned about the customer's experience

The Result 

By reading "No Marketing " or "0% Marketing ", The consumer, to some extent is made to believe that the brand works on transparency and is urged to try the product. With this approach, brands were able to convert leads into sales and met their marketing goals without actually saying it

Social Media and Privacy Concerns

 Social media has become an indispensable part of our lives. The fine line of distinction between real and virtual life seems to fade each day, even more during these uncertain times when the entire world is under lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Such times have provided people with an opportunity to develop or enhance their skills, and start that blog that they thought of a while ago but had no time to invest in it. People have seemed to reconnect with their long lost hobbies and are now more confident to display them on the internet, particularly on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and audio-video platforms like Tik Tok and youtube.

 Utilising their time productively we have come across n number of influencers, chefs, motivational speakers, video bloggers, writers etc. who have gone public on social media with their work to make it big. 

The world wide web, no doubt has provided a free space for upcoming artists to display their work and writers, enabling them to self publish. However, when it comes to Social media, going public brings with it, some concerns, primarily 'Privacy concerns'.

In the digital age, the role of social media is not only limited to connecting with fellow users but also promoting one's business so as to increase the market value of their products and services to models, hoping to land a contract through their aesthetic Instagram feeds or artists wanting their work to be discovered and appreciated. Everything is digital.

Social media, in the digital age, has great potential to become a huge employment generator. The question that now arises is if or not our privacy is maintained on websites. To subscribe to a website's products and services, it becomes imperative to provide socio-demographic data like personal details, phone number, email and at times GPS location. With the trend of memes and trolling, a person who posts something that does not interest an individual's core values is likely to become a victim to online harassment and trolling. Online harassment often includes actions carried out through an electronic medium like a mobile phone, tablet, or computer intending to directly disrupt a person's mental peace or make them fall victim to a crime.

Crimes are also committed online. Such a crime committed through an electronic medium is termed 'cybercrime'. Very often, the content that we choose to post on our social media handles and lack of privacy measures that enable us to go public and our choice to share every aspect of our lives on such platforms end up making us a subject to cybercrime. All it takes is your IP address or if you choose to go public on social media platforms, then your GPS location for a stranger to find you. There have been real cases when crimes have been committed with the accused figuring out the real-time location of the victim through their social media. 

Citing the example of a popular Netflix show, 'YOU'. Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) stalks a girl, Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail) through her public social media handle in the busy city of New York until he finally gains access to her mobile phone and eventually her social media contacts. In the entire course of the show, Joe stalks Beck and murders her acquaintances and ultimately, Beck herself. Indirectly or directly, the show portrays how easy it is, in the digital age for our data to be misused.

Just like your real life, your social life must also be private irrespective of a public or private social media handle. Avoid posting and updating about your personal life. Check your settings regularly so as to know if your location is being used in the background by a website or an application. Last but not the least, refrain from providing personal details to websites on the world wide web.

Stay Cyber smart. Stay Cyber safe.