Your customer service data may be an untapped resource for content marketing ideas. Content marketers often don’t interact with customers to hear their feedback. But data is waiting for you. Content from customer service ideas will likely be highly valuable to your audience. So, how can you dig into this data to develop relevant, engaging content?
Closing the Feedback Loop
Does your enterprise content team beg customer-facing roles for feedback? Closing the feedback loop is one of the biggest challenges for marketing. Without these insights, you can make many assumptions. You can even prove some of these by diving into your content analytics to see which topics have the most engagement.
But to let the voice of the customer be a guiding force in content ideation, you need the data. In most cases, your organization uses contact center software to manage customer service inquiries. You also have self-service options like chatbots or knowledge bases. By aggregating this data, you can find patterns and trends that make it clear where your audience is struggling.
Here are some key ways to get the data and use it to develop relevant content your audience will find appealing.
Customer Surveys Provide More Than Just Satisfaction Scores
As a best practice, you should be surveying your customer base at least once annually. Your company may do this to check the pulse of how satisfied customers are with your product, service, and support. You can also use it as a vehicle to get feedback on:
- Challenges they face relating to what you provide (i.e., emerging issues in the industry, barriers to adoption, etc.)
- Their wish list of what they’d like to be able to do with your product (i.e., features, functionality, capabilities)
- Why they don’t use certain tools you offer (i.e., if you provide a suite of software but they only subscribe to specific modules)
- What trends they’re tracking
- Areas where they need additional support from your company (i.e., content around how to achieve goals, increase revenue, etc.)
This information can be like hitting the content lottery. You’re hearing directly from customers about their struggles, worries, and needs. You’ll likely see repetitive answers from survey takers, indicating this is a key content topic for your content calendar.
After you have the results, put time on the schedule for a brainstorming exercise on transforming these content for customer service ideas into future projects.
Contact Center Data Can Highlight Complaint and Concern Patterns
If customers repeatedly contact customer service with similar complaints and concerns, there’s an opportunity to get it right in the future. If customers have the same issues, that demonstrates that your message is getting lost and needs a retune.
Take onboarding content, for example. Your team may collaborate with customer success to deliver various resources, from how-to videos to guides to FAQs. While you may think it’s complete and hits all the main points, your contact center data may tell a different story. If customers keep contacting you about how to do something you’ve missed in the onboarding content, you need to update it. That can also mean expanding your FAQs or knowledge bases.
Also, you might proactively send out new content to recently onboarded customers with these details before they have time to ask the question.
Get Insights from Training You Offer Customers
Many companies have training programs for customers. This can range from a series on how to sell digital advertising, to regulations about worksite safety. These courses are a value add for your audience, and you hope that people will gain knowledge on how to be better at their jobs.
Their progress and any feedback they offer can be another opportunity to find great content topics. It can also help you improve your current learning center. What might you learn from your customers here?
They could leave feedback about other questions they have not in the courses. Another way to look for topics is post-course quizzes. Look at the areas where people struggled to get the answer right. In both situations, you can use this to expand your content plan.
Listen in on Customer Calls
Another option to get content marketers closer to the customer is letting them be flies on the wall. Customer success team members may have regular calls with your biggest customers to discuss a variety of topics. If you can be part of these calls as a non-participant or get access to the recordings, you may learn a lot.
Since content marketers are so “close to the product,” it’s easy to let bias cloud your perspective. Because you know so much about how something works, you may not see how your audience views it. Being able to hear directly from the customer on what matters can deliver “aha” moments.
What you learn can help you to attract future customers. It can also be valuable for retaining your current ones. You should consistently be producing content for them as well. It could be to upsell or cross-sell and just general industry trend information, keeping them up to date, and trusting your brand as a reliable source. It feeds into the importance of customer experience, which goes beyond being responsive and helpful. It also includes how you support your customers in times of change and uncertainty.
Content from Customer Service: Get Closer to the Customer to Improve Relevance
The closer you can get to the customer, the better. Even though you don’t have daily contact with them, others do, and all that information is ready for you to leverage. By surveying them, mining your contact center data, looking at training content data, and participating in check-in calls, there’s a lot to uncover!
Keep your content as relevant as possible with these tips. And keep it all organized and streamlined with DivvyHQ, designed by and for content marketers. Start a trial today to see how it works.