Marketing and Service work at opposite ends of the most hands-on part of the customer experience: the sale. If the two worked together more consistently, they could take customer satisfaction to a higher level.

Most companies let Marketing do its thing to bring in leads. Then Service does its part to keep customers happy and loyal.

“Once viewed as unrelated departments on opposite ends of the sales cycle, there’s no evidence that marketing and customer service teams are operating as extensions of each other,” say researchers at Salesforce, which recently released its fifth edition of The State of Marketing. “However, marketing and service alignment hasn’t yet reached peak sophistication.”

That’s because most companies tie Marketing to Sales, and Sales to Service. Bridging them directly together now can pay off.

Here are four areas where Marketing and Service can work together to improve the customer experience:

1.     Collaborate on social media

About two-thirds of the highest performing marketing teams collaborate with customer service to handle social media, the Salesforce study found. That means they share duties creating content and responding to customer inquiries, concerns and shout-outs.

For you: Create a team of marketers and service pros to work together on social media. Service pros, who respond to customers all day, every day will have ideas on what content customers need based on the questions and problems they hear. Marketers want to let service pros know the content they plan to put in social, so reps are trained and ready to respond to any campaign.

2. Curb messaging when issues arise

Just about 35% of marketers suppress messages to customers who have open, ongoing issues and are working with Service. Those customers are already at risk. Getting marketing messages while they’re frustrated can make them more upset – and cause them to walk.

For you: Service wants to share a list daily – or several times a day depending on your customer demand – of customers with open issues. Marketing wants to pull their names and contact from marketing messages across all channels until Service confirms issues are resolved.

3. Open the data

Many marketing and service teams work in silos, keeping their data and using it for internal benchmarks and improvement plans. Just about 55% of marketers and service pros share data openly and easily, Salesforce found.

For you: Marketing and Service will want to sit together first to share all the kinds of data they gather and use. Then each department can decide what will be valuable to them, avoiding information overload and recognizing they can call for more later. Plus, they’ll want to establish how they’d like to receive the data and what they plan to do with it.

4. Set common goals

Just about half of marketing and service teams share common goals and metrics, which leaves them often running in different directions and creating room for problems in the customer experience.

For you: As data sharing, messaging alignment and shared social media management improves, Marketing and Service will want to work together to set goals based on customer satisfaction and retention.

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