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How Great Customer Support Gives You a Competitive Edge

May 24, 2022
Jeff Haws

We’re huge advocates for making top-notch customer support an essential feature you demand out of any marketing platform you’re going to work with. There are several reasons it should be high on your list of priorities. Having a dedicated customer support representative will ultimately help you in ways you might not even anticipate as you go through an RFP process.

But there’s one gain from customer support that goes beyond tangible improvements and looks at your industry as a whole: great customer support is a competitive advantage for you. That’s especially true since so few marketing platforms give you the white-glove service you need and deserve. In a sense, it’s a market inefficiency. If you can take advantage of it, the opportunity could be huge.

Here’s how customer support can give you a competitive edge:

You can move faster

If you’ve ever tried to put in a help ticket with your marketing platform or ESP, you probably know what we’re talking about here. If they can get back to you within the week, it’s cause for celebration. In the meantime, you’ve just got to move on to other things. Hopefully, your issue isn’t absolutely critical. If it is, you may have to put essential marketing operations on hold for an indefinite period of time.

Now, imagine what it’s like to be able to get someone on the phone 24/7 when needed. Yes, an actual, dedicated customer support representative whose job is to help get your problem solved. While your competition is still waiting to hear back, you’ve already gotten the help you needed and are moving forward with your campaign. In your highly competitive industry, there’s no question that time is money.

You’ll have a deliverability plan

You shouldn’t expect a ton of deliverability help from most marketing platforms. They’ll talk about it if you want and give you some guidance, but getting a seasoned deliverability expert on the phone — especially for more nuanced or technical questions — is going to be next to impossible. If you have issues with IP warmup or spam complaints, much of the work of solving the problem will be up to you or the deliverability specialists you found and paid yourself.

Instead, think about having a deliverability plan delivered to your team from experts who are invested in your success, ready at any time to have a conversation and equip you with whatever you need to ensure your campaigns are consistently landing in inboxes. While your competitors are seeing Gmail throttle their sends, you’re warming up smartly and getting off to the running start you need.

You have the confidence you need

How many times do marketers shy away from what could be a great messaging campaign because they don’t have the support they need to be confident in executing it? It happens too often. Whether that’s because they won’t be able to get access to the data points they need or they’ve been burned with things going wrong before without any help, marketers can play it safe when they need to be unleashing their creativity to make their data work for them.

With great customer service, though, there are no concerns. Your marketing team can do whatever they can dream up, confident that help is just a phone call or email away if anything comes up that they can’t handle. This kind of confidence will allow your marketing team to execute campaigns the competition won’t. And, over time, that sort of boldness will undoubtedly pay off with better bottom-line results.

Takeaways

Great customer support doesn’t just deliver tangible results for your marketing team, but it will give your company an advantage over the vast majority of your competitors that didn’t prioritize it during their search and so have subpar service from their marketing platform. Make it a priority, and it will pay off.

About the Author

Jeff Haws

As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.