Customer success can be a marketing goldmine if you look in the right places. True, if your product is a disaster and all CS is ever fielding are screaming customers, this might not be the case, but if that’s true, you have different problems.

CS teams who work well to solve problems for clients have direct access to clients and the opportunity to quickly ask questions to the gold your marketing team needs.

How about asking while you’re on the phone instead of sending yet another post-call survey?

You have a captive audience on the line (or in the chat) because they’ve contacted customer service. And some people might think, oh they’re angry because of it maybe, or maybe it was a quick fix, or maybe it was easily done.

People who work in customer success are generally people who want to help people. That’s why they get into that. They get energy from helping other people. When you get energy from helping other people you can raise the energy of the conversation when you help them.

So you’ve helped them and now things are good and maybe they feel better. I mean that’s essentially what they can expect. A customer can expect from the customer success team that they are upset about a problem or they have a question, and the success team is there to solve that and to alleviate their pain in some way.

So it’s a great opportunity and you have a captive audience that has just experience. Whether they’re live chat or call or zoom or however it’s working, it’s a great opportunity for customer success to ask just three simple questions.

• What do you love about our product?
  What’s really fun for you? You can ask that in a really chill, casual way.
  
  

• Is there a pain that it solves that you used to really hate? What pain does this solve for you?
  Who knows, it might be the pain they just solved right then. Maybe they’ve been trying to do something and called customer success and now that can do it. Score!
  
  

• Can I use it as a testimonial?
  This is the clincher that becomes easier and easier the more you do it. “Hey I love what you just shared, can I use that as a testimonial?”
  
  

Sometimes the client might say yes, but let me say something a little nicer, or yes and you can add this. Because remember a testimonial is someone’s voice, and everyone wants their voice to be heard and to be viewed or to be seen.

I have personally had two authors ask me for testimonials about their book which I’m aware helps them, but I still feel incredibly proud to be featured in those books and that my opinion is heard. I think it’s a natural thing for all of us to want to feel heard.

I imagine other people who have given book testimonials and reviews feel the same way or they wouldn’t have given it. So if you frame it the right way it can be really powerful to ask someone their opinion.

Okay and then you say all right we’ve got enough testimonials we don’t need more. That’s not true.

You might not want to feature them all on the website, but in terms of social media, and this is just marketing 101, but it’s worth repeating when you use your customer’s language and their words, the power behind that is palpable.

So much that it really is the goldmine that you’re looking for to stem your pillars of social media content and your digital campaigns.

Put their words in there. Even simple ones.
“This product is awesome. I love how it does XYZ.”

You don’t know who’s going to read it. It might just catch them at exactly the right time.

And it saves the marketer from having to come up with yet another angle at the message that might be forced if you’ve been marketing a product for a while. It’s easier to get bored and tired of coming up with new ways to promote the product. Your perspectives would rather hear from other customers.

The voice of the customer to use their language directly is a goldmine. Then use that gold to inspire new campaigns.

Get inspired by the voice of the customer.

It really is a goldmine.

And it’s not just that — it’s also the gold standard. If you are not getting marketing content from your customer success team, you’re missing something essential in your business.

And any of the reasons that get in the way are problems that are worthy of solving, because it really will help you in powerful ways.

So remind your customer success team to ask just three simple questions:

• What do you love about our product?
  
  

• What pain does this solve for you?
  
  

• Can I use it as a testimonial?
  
  

And you’ll have marketing gold for miles.