In today's intensely demanding market world, customer service is a practice that should be top of mind for any employee at every business. Of necessity, a customer service team's main aim is to attract existing clients by making them satisfied. However, offering outstanding customer support requires more than just answering questions and addressing concerns.

Customers would focus on solving their issues on their own if they can do it easily and thoroughly. When a customer has an issue with your product or service, the first thing that comes to mind isn't to call you.

According to Dimension Data, 73% of customers choose to use a company's website for help,  instead of using their social media, SMS, or live chat. Rather than dealing with a customer service agent, they now want to look for answers online through a FAQ post or an information base.

This kind of behavior causes companies to implement a self-service system. Self-service would be the most effective way to resolve issues because they don't have to wait for the company to answer. There are many ways to use customer service as marketing content:

1. Use Frequently Asked Question

Many of the questions asked by customers are usually repeated. And the answers to these often asked questions are a gold mine with content marketing opportunities.

You can create content such as FAQ forums to help customers with the same issues. For example, Amazon has a system where they strive to stop answering the same question twice. They gathered feedback from all of their customers so they can address the same issue that’s been happening to all of their customers.

2. Use Customer Review/Rating

You can use customer testimonials and ratings as sales materials. According to Wyzowl, 9 out of 10 people value what customers have to say about a company rather than what the company thinks about itself. And according to Spectoos, consumers are more likely to pay 31% more on a company that has positive consumer testimonials.

People trust feedback just as much as they trust personal endorsements from friends and family, but as long as you have outstanding customer service, you will benefit from good reviews online and include them in your numerous onsite and offsite advertising activities. This will prove that you care for your customers and at the same time endorsing your brand.

3. Create a Customer Service and Content Marketing Hybrid

According to The Center for Generational Kinetics, you can create an easy-to-navigate self-help video library. Begin by going through the most popular questions or issues that customers carry to you, and then make a short video that demonstrates how to resolve each one. This may include instructions on how to create an online account, upgrade a battery, or swap a previously purchased item.

Use informative titles for each video so that customers can type in a particular query and get tips that are important to their search. The most important thing is that the videos contain basic step-by-step instructions and can be watched on any mobile screen. If you want to take things a step further, ask your customers to submit their own how-to videos and award awards to the best. In that way, you can kill two birds with one stone.

These aren't the only ways to use customer support in a marketing sense, but they're among the most practical and efficient. 

You can use OneTalk by TapTalk.io to help you create great marketing content. One of their useful features is Case Detail. It allows you to know the history of your customers and help you to handle it at a later date. By doing so, you can collect your customers' frequently asked questions and then create an information base or FAQ forum. This feature also helps you find out how long a client has been waiting for a reply, their case history, the channel they use, and much more.

They also have another feature that can help you regarding the same issue. It’s called Topics. With this feature, you can separate cases according to the topics you have created. This helps you to navigate how many issues your customers have in common. You can also use it to customize the incoming case according to the right agent based on their respective department. This way, your customers can quickly be served by the right people.

Combining customer service and marketing results in enhanced organizational communications and clear messages through the business. If the two teams interact, the customer service department is aware of the exclusive deals or content that the marketing department is pushing and may direct customers to. Customer service as a marketing content encourages cross-departmental teamwork, which is just what you get when you incorporate it into your overall marketing strategy.

**For more information about OneTalk and SendTalk, do not hesitate to contact the team by WhatsApp or email!

The sales industry was totally disrupted in 2020, and companies responded by rethinking how they develop, prepare, and grow new strategies. And like the previous year, 2021 will carry its own range of challenges and improvements. To prepare you for this year, we have some sales and marketing projection that might be useful for you

1. CMOs will be held responsible for the sales

Given their access to critical market and buyer data, CMOs play a particularly important role. CMOs can bridge the gap between marketing and sales by gathering the most valuable information for sales and providing it to them in an easily digestible format. Bridging the gap between the two will generate more revenue in the long run.

However, in this year, businesses will be under more pressure than ever before to increase revenue. It has infiltrated the re-evaluation of all operations with the goal of determining what actually raises the revenue. This means that everyone in a company is now responsible for revenue in some way.

Those who related in this area will be a part of marketing's shift from sales support to revenue accelerator.

2. The CRM is on borrowed time as we know it

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, such as the use of AI, bots, and others. Because your teams and buyers are now all remote, solutions must be built to operate online and rely on technology such as artificial intelligence to allow your teams to focus on revenue-generating tasks.

The CRM that we know is being phased out in favor of dynamic conversation models that aggregate data, infer conclusions, and require less human management. Because everything uses data and AI, it may result in job displacement.

But, there’s no need to be worried, displacement does not always imply destruction. While administrative tasks like email databasing and CRM data logging will be replaced by A.I., the result will be a complete reorganization of how we view work, resulting in new opportunities that require creativity, agility, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence that only a human can provide.

3. B2B Sales Culture has Changed

The pandemic has compelled B2B buyers and sellers to go fully digital. Prior to Covid-19, most salespeople relied on high-touch tactics to close deals. Such as business lunches, live entertainment, and plenty of face-to-face interaction. Even if you weren't dining, you were probably flying from one location to another for a one-hour meeting.

According to Mckinsey & Company, all of those traditional approaches will no longer work. It is because the pandemic has changed everything, which has forced a high-touch process to become digital-first. This has accelerated the third marketing era, in which brands must meet customers on their own terms and learn to close deals in a purely digital environment. Even if we are able to reassemble in a safe manner, there is no going back to the way things were.

Increased customer expectations, massive technological advancements, and the rise of omnichannel commerce are just a few of the sales trends reshaping the industry. 

According to Mckinsey survey, these pandemic-induced trends are expected to become permanent. It is clear that companies must consider how they will transform the in-store experience by utilizing emerging technologies and big data on customers. Customers want their shopping experience to be personalized in some way, and research shows that effective personalization can boost store revenues by 20-30%. 

To serve today's highly digital, well-informed customers, stores are increasingly expected to provide a wide range of omnichannel services, i.e., services that can be accessed through multiple channels. Many consumers, for example, use a variety of channels to gather product information before making a purchase.

As omnichannel shopping becomes the new norm, consumers and retailers must be prepared to provide fast, flawless omnichannel delivery. OneTalk by TapTalk.io is one of the omnichannel services that you can use. They provide many channels, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, Line, and Facebook Messenger. The use of this technology has provided easier communication and sales transactions

With OneTalk, you can answer all chats from your customers on various platforms in one inbox. Your customers can buy, ask questions, and get answers online without any hassle by coming to your physical store. By doing so it will provide a much easier transaction because everything can be done online. Other than that, you can also monitor how your agents attend customers.

If 2020 has taught us something, it's that you never know what's around the corner, but these movements are all about being adaptable and easy to adjust. Hopefully, these projections can help you prepare for the year.