Even at the same company, small things can unknowingly pit the marketing, sales, and customer support teams against each other. Aligning everyone toward a singular goal often involves an unspoken and undocumented effort, but those moves can really improve customer service numbers. To this end, Help Scout provides some great tips for better integrating your customer support teams with marketing and sales.
Define Customer Personas
What’s Help Scout’s first suggestion toward aligning these three separate squads? Build a customer persona. If you’ve never built a one before, the practice consists of assigning a human person to your traditionally vague customer profile, giving that person wants, needs, emotions, and characteristics. Building these profiles can “help your whole company understand who your ideal customers are; they’ll also help you talk about and to those customers in a more targeted and concrete way.”
Nailing down a customer persona gives the customer support team insight into who your customer are and what they need, but it comes in handy in every department: “If you’re both talking about ‘Mary the marketing manager,’ you can advocate for Mary’s interests instead of arguing about your personal preferences, making Mary (your customer) the framework for decision making.”
Encourage Team Training
You can also encourage camaraderie between departments by putting them through the ringer together. Promoting team training with members of other departments can really bring out new and different interactions. “At Help Scout, every new team member gets support training and spends time helping our customers with their questions.” That’s every new employee, not just those destined for customer support.
Help Scout continues, “Regular cross-team training can help expose team members to the challenges and knowledge of other parts of the company, which results in clearer understanding and communication.” Lessonly training gives cross-departmental learning even more impact by letting learners document what they gained.
Lessonly keeps your departmental knowledge on-point and helps your customer support team truly integrate with the rest of the office. Take a tour of Lessonly. Sign up today.
