How Are Customer Service and Public Relations Integrated?

Your customer relations department and public relations teams are entirely different operations. However, they intersect in crucial ways. In order to succeed in your public relations goals, your business needs to be on top of its customer service and satisfaction game.

Unifying customer service and public relations within your business strategy is critical. If you have any questions, be sure to reach out to the TeleDirect team—we are customer service pros with over 20 years of experience across American industries.

Why Is Public Relations Important?

Public relations (PR) make up part of the foundation of any successful business, regardless of industry, company size or location. Your public relations department works hard to maintain your ideal brand image. This is done through all kinds of outlets, like social media, press, events and community outreach. PR work ensures that your business is best represented to the public, allowing you to enjoy a better reputation, convert more leads and retain more customers.

Though public relations are handled by a talented team of professionals, their work cannot exist in a vacuum. Your public reputation will also be shaped by the actual experiences customers have when they use your product or service and how they are treated when support is required. This is why your customer service department is a crucial puzzle piece to consider when optimizing your public relations strategy.

How to Create an Integrated Communications Strategy with PR and Customer Service

Stick to Your Branding

our brand is how your company represents itself to the general public. Many departments within your company will likely contribute toward creating a cohesive brand, particularly your public relations crew, marketing and creative team and customer service department.

It’s important for these departments to work together to ensure consistent and engaging branding—but many companies don’t pay enough attention to their customer service department. While their social media and other branding paint the picture of an ideal business, customers experience whiplash when trying to receive support or resolution to queries or issues. When customers can’t reach your company or receive off-brand or unhelpful service, it paints an unfortunate, skewed picture of your brand—and that’s bad PR.

Luckily, there is a straightforward way to keep your brand on point across all outlets, including your customer service. By outsourcing a call center, you can work closely with live agents to create branded scripts for every conversation, ensuring that your business is accurately represented to your clients and leads through every conversation.

Consider Customer Retention

Good public relations are an important key to better customer retention and lead conversion—and that’s truer now than ever before. Regardless of what industry you may be in, it’s likely that you have several local (or national) competitors—and we live in an age of constant, thorough digital communication. When your leads are considering investing in your services or products, it’s likely that they’ll do plenty of research to ensure that your brand rises above the competition. That can involve anything from scouring your social media to sifting through online reviews. When you have the best reputation in town, more leads will choose to become customers.

However, good customer service doesn’t only help companies convert leads. A new customer doesn’t necessarily mean a lifelong one. By unifying your customer service strategy with your overall PR, you can help ensure that your customer retention levels are high. After all, if your new customer runs into issues and experiences bad customer service, you can lose them forever and potentially experience negative PR as a result. This can be avoided with a customer-focused outsourced contact center that knows your branding and business ethos well. Many business process outsourcing (BPO) call centers (like TeleDirect) also offer live outbound calling services and satisfaction surveys, so you can check in with your customers and make sure they are happy.

Meet Customer Expectations

In an ideal world, your customer service department and your public relations team will work together to make sure that all of your client expectations are met. In most cases, your customer service team will handle your client queries and issues—all according to your unique branding, verbiage and business values. However, there are times when your public relations department can (and should) step in.

Let’s say that a client or lead has a significant problem with your product, service or even a negative customer support experience—and they make a post on social media that goes viral. In a situation like this, your PR team can handle damage control, whether that’s by developing a genuine apology message, addressing the issue publicly or both. These actions will ensure that your customer expectations are met, even in negative circumstances.

While you cannot always prevent crises from occurring or bad press, by unifying your customer service and public relations strategies, you can ensure that your reputation survives. In fact, you can even learn and grow as a result.

Outsource Your Customer Service Center

The best way to enjoy good public relations and provide stellar customer service to your leads and clients? Outsource your call center! By investing in a BPO contact center service, you can guarantee a professional, experienced customer service experience that suits your exact needs and branding.

At TeleDirect, we’ve been providing first-class customer support and call center services to American industries for more than 20 years. Whether you need inbound live agents, outbound calling, 24/7 coverage or dedicated appointment booking services, TeleDirect can provide everything customer service-related that you need to enjoy great PR. Give us a call at (800) 776-1081 for a free quote and to talk about your unique needs. We can’t wait to learn all about your brand!