Delivering exceptional customer service is essential if you want your business to stand out from the crowd and increase loyalty.
In recent years, the way in which businesses deliver customer service has changed significantly, with a shift from over-the-phone conversations to customer service on social media and through email.
Another great way to deliver customer service is through content – and below, we’ve rounded up just a few of the benefits of doing exactly that.
Increases brand loyalty
There are a range of benefits of content marketing for small and medium-sized businesses, and one of the biggest is increased brand loyalty and awareness.
By introducing content marketing to your customer service strategy and investing in search engine optimisation, customers and potential leads will be able to find your brand and website at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when they search for answers to their problem – demonstrating your authority as a brand and helping them get answers to their question as soon as possible.
This form of content marketing can even help you poach customers from other companies in your niche.
If you run a computer repair shop, for example, and you rank at number one for an article on how to reboot your machine, your brand will be exposed to everyone who searches for computer reboots – both customers, and people who are yet to hear about your brand.
Speeds up response times
In today’s always-online world, customers want to be able to find the answer to their questions as soon as possible.
Creating a valuable knowledge base packed with information and answers to commonly asked questions can cut response times and help you answer questions almost immediately.
Provided you have enough content and your customers can navigate it through an easy-to-use website, customers will have access to always-on, 24/7 customer support.
To take your content marketing and customer service experience to the next level, you may even want to invest in algorithms to recommend articles based on customer queries.
This will not only direct people to the most appropriate channel as soon as possible, but cut down on the number of queries you receive.
An example of content marketing being used for customer service using smart algorithms
Reduces strain on customer support team
Whether you’re a one-man-band or you’ve got an office of staff, every minute spent responding to customer enquiries is a minute you could be spending on lead generation, customer retention of marketing.
That’s even truer if you’re paying for a dedicated customer support team, or you outsource your customer support to a third-party. Customer support can be expensive.
Of course, having a one-on-one with a potential lead is essential, but content marketing can be used to reduce the strain on your customer support team and help answer questions in the quickest and most efficient manner possible.
Rather than sending an email from scratch, you can direct people to the most relevant article or blog post to have their question answered.
Ensures consistency
Consistency is key when it comes to customer service.
You don’t want to cross wires when you are talking to a lead, nor do you want to relay incorrect or potentially dangerous advice to one of your customers.
Having a knowledge bank where you can find approved information is the most sensible way to handle customer service, and making it public ensures consistency and transparency for all.
What’s more, if you’ve got a dedicated customer service team working for your company, then training a new starter won’t take long, as their primary responsibility will be to redirect people to your content.
Indeed, if your business is large enough to warrant a move, you could even consider artificial intelligence and auto-responders to cut your customer service department entirely.
Offers SEO benefits
We’ve already talked about how content marketing can help you rank on search engines, but there are other SEO benefits to writing tutorials and how-to content.
Having a bank of high-quality material can make your business appear as an authority figure and increase your chances of securing backlinks from other websites.
Content can also help to drive free, organic traffic to your site.
Use this to your advantage by adding calls to action to capture email addresses and free trial signs on your high-traffic support pages.
Wrapping up
There’s no denying that content marketing can be hard work and time-consuming, especially if you want to write a blog post on every common query from your customers.
One of the best ways to introduce more content to your customer service strategy is to do it reactively; when a customer gets in touch and asks a question, write a blog post about it and direct them to it.
Over time, you’ll build up a bank of valuable content that customers that will be useful for years to come. And that content will only grow in value as time goes on.