Guest Post: How To Get Customer Service, Sales & Marketing Teams On The Same Page

This week, we feature an article by Dmitry Dragilev, Founder of the keyword and SEO tools, TopicRanker.com, JustReachOut, and Chief SEO Geek. He shares how to get your customer service, sales, and marketing teams in sync.

One of the most overlooked struggles for any business’s customer experience is getting every team on the same page. 

I saw this at my startup JustReachOut. Teams struggled to share information, which damaged how customers saw us. Since every department plays a role in the customer experience, poor communication in just one department can affect the rest. 

But we found a simple solution that made everything work together and actually improved customer satisfaction. 

This wasn’t just a problem with my business, though. It’s a common problem for any organization with separate departments, especially customer service, marketing, and sales. Thankfully, there’s a solution that can get everyone on track and improve how customers perceive your brand. 

Are Your Teams in Sync? 

If you haven’t carefully planned a way to ensure your teams communicate well, they’ve probably fallen out of sync. At JustReachOut, this led to customer confusion and frustration. 

For example, a current customer would submit a help ticket and start getting help on how to fix the problem. But because customer support wasn’t sharing information with our sales team, the customer would also get sales messages trying to upsell on the next tier. 

 Or a prospect would visit the site and send an email with questions about the product, then later start a chat conversation. But since neither knew what the other was doing, the conversations were disjointed and redundant. 

The root of the issue is that our out-of-sync teams developed information silos. These collections of data often happen, intentionally or not. And when departments hoard information, the problem only gets worse. 

It’s easy to blame this on the teams themselves, but it’s usually not a people problem. The issue lies with the systems and software that help your teams share information. And by changing how your teams share information automatically, this problem often disappears. 

The Solution to Silos: Unified Communication 

Chances are your departments use different types of software to do their job. Messages, questions, tickets, and sales inquiries come in, are dealt with, and archived by the same department. This may be simpler, but it leads to the kind of redundant communication issues we saw at JustReachOut. 

One of the best solutions to improving cross-team collaboration is unified communication. In this system, all the communication channels across your entire team are integrated into one platform. 

Phone, email, chat, support tickets, and sales outreach all come together and sync up. By tying together several tools into one platform, your teams can work efficiently with each customer, see their previous conversations, and understand their specific needs. In some cases, it can even help your team predict future challenges and take a proactive approach to the customer experience. 

Perhaps the easiest way to make this work is by choosing all-in-one platforms that can handle several of the same capabilities. For example, modern business phone systems include built-in features like phone, chat, video calls, SMS texts, and more in a single system. Help desk software can pull together live chat, email, help tickets, and more. 

If you don’t have an all-in-one tool to use—or need to add extra capabilities—you can tie several tools together using an app to import and export data as need be. This allows you the flexibility of using as many platforms as you need while ensuring everyone has accurate, up-to-date information. 

For example, at JustReachOut, we use Zapier to connect Help Scout (our customer support software) with HubSpot (our CRM). Whenever we update customer information or have a conversation in Help Scout, it automatically appears in HubSpot for the rest of the team to see. This means better conversations, more relevant communication, and a seamless experience that’s focused on our customers.  

This kind of system doesn’t take very long to set up, but once it’s ready to implement it makes everything smoother. 

Concluding Advice 

Making improvements in cross-team collaboration will lead to improvements in customer experience. The better your teams can work together, the better they’ll help your customers, and the better experience you’ll deliver overall. 

When we implemented this system at JustReachOut, the results have spoken for themselves. We’ve improved our customer experience and built better, more robust systems for everyone across all departments to share information quickly and efficiently. 

And it isn’t difficult. With a few simple adjustments, you can build an automatic system that ensures every customer gets the quality service they deserve. 

Dmitry Dragilev is the founder of the keyword and SEO solutions, TopicRanker.com, JustReachOut, and Chief SEO Geek

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors, go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: I Don’t Like Your Politics: How Political Views Can Hurt (Or Help) Your Business