The goal of customer support from a PR perspective
Make no mistake, customer support is a key part of your PR effort.
Nothing else in a business or organisation touches individual users like customer support every day. The message customer support sends out can be more effective than entire marketing and PR campaigns.
Sadly, many companies treat customer support as a necessary evil. It’s something they have to do in order to appease frustrated users.
But in my view, this completely misses the point.
One problem solved, one happy user, one voter, one listener won’t make your organisation a success. Solving a problem is often poor value for money.
The aim of customer support should instead not be to solve one person’s problem (although it does that by default) but to get an individual in order to get them to tell their friends and business associates how great you are.
The aim of customer support then is indeed to solve problems but more importantly to delight people.
What can you learn from customer support?
Customer service teams are speaking to customers one on one every day and if you’ve every spent time in customer support you also know they talk to the most frustrated customers.
If customers are angry there is a good chance that something your organisation did made them that way.
It could be poor messaging, poor experience from support, bad products and design.
Everything we do as an organisation from human contact to the product sends out a powerful public relations message. It affects how people feel.
If customers are angry, PRs should be helping to identify the message being sent out and the impact on the brand.
They can then work out what needs to change to match the message the organisation wants to send out and where things can’t be fixed, PRs can help develop the messaging for customer service teams to use to help reduce the impact.
Listen to the episode for more context
Photo by Olha Ruskykh: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-view-of-a-laptop-and-a-headset-7504896/