These days, customer service and marketing must be closely intertwined. In fact, many e-commerce brands have a chief customer officer overseeing the marketing and customer service side of the business.
If you think about it, the same prospects you’re targeting on Facebook and Google are the same customers reaching out to you on Messenger and WhatsApp after the purchase. Therefore, brands need a pre-purchase and post-purchase expert to oversee the full experience.
This is an important revelation. If marketing and customer service aren’t communicating on a regular basis, you won’t experience growth like the top 1%. Think about it: if marketers don’t know WHY customers leave after their first purchase, they won’t try to overcome that pain point in their pre-purchase marketing or post-purchase follow-ups.
On the flip side, if customer service doesn’t know what marketing is selling, the reps won’t have a good answer to the customer when they call in with questions, comments, or complaints about what they’ve been sold. The customer doesn’t care who helps them; they just care about the product, service, or experience living up to their expectations.
Adoption means that you need to WOW the customer right out of the box (literally!) and anticipate their needs before they even ask. You’re not selling them anything; you want to help them adopt the product and unlock its value immediately. Start this phase by positioning yourself as helpful within every touchpoint.
From a marketing perspective, you can have full control over the post-purchase email that shares links to FAQs, user manuals, or videos along with customer service touchpoints.
Want a simple yet great example of an Adoption Phase? Take Apple and their iPhone. Ever noticed how the iPhone comes nearly fully charged, so you can immediately turn it on and start using it?
Before Apple started pre-charging its products, customers would have to charge their electronics or, worse, search for batteries to use immediately. How terrible does that sound right now? Apple knew that people wanted to use their iPhones immediately, so they pre-charged them to help customers adopt them quicker.
Map out your Adoption Phase so the customer can see value from their purchase immediately. The Adoption Phase is critical to delighting the customer right away. All communications, touchpoints (like the physical box and inserts), teams, and content should be orchestrated together to help the customer adopt the product. Will continue with phase 2 of the post-purchase hourglass in my next blog post.