4 Steps to Connected Marketing and Service Experiences

A unified marketing and service strategy can deliver more personalized customer journeys. Here's how to build yours.

 

What do customers really want? This is a question that marketers and service agents have been grappling with for ages. With more ways to connect than ever before, the answer has become more complicated. On average, consumers engage with companies across eight channels, forcing companies to fine-tune their channel strategy. According to our “State of Service” report, 84% of company decision makers are reevaluating their channel resourcing to meet customers on the right platform at the right time. From promotional marketing to customer support, the multitude of touchpoints along a customer’s journey necessitates a more seamless, connected marketing and service approach.

Here’s a quick answer to the above question. Customers want a smooth experience, no matter how they choose to connect with a business — whether they visit your website, engage on social media, or contact customer service. According to our “State of the Connected Customer” report, customers’ number one frustration is a disconnected experience.

By bringing all their data onto a single platform, teams can better manage full-funnel customer journeys and power more relevant experiences. This approach makes customers feel heard and valued — inspiring interest and triggering demand.

Connecting experiences through data benefits more than just your customers. Sure, that’s priority number one. But it also improves the efficiency of your different departments. It can help power marketing experiences that replace service case loads or unlock AI tools that can support agents to better scale the way they serve customers. This is all while ensuring the customer experience remains consistent and accurate for every customer.

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In this article, we’ll break down four steps to building this connected marketing and service experience that is beneficial for customers and your teams alike:

  • Keep: Acquire customers and keep them for life
  • Satisfy: Build customer happiness
  • Accelerate: Speed up the delivery of customer benefits
  • Reduce: Decrease service center volume
 

What is a connected marketing and service experience?

Connected marketing marries cross-departmental efforts to create seamless and personalized experiences across all customer touchpoints. It’s about bringing teams together to efficiently deliver exactly what the customer needs.

You might be surprised to know you already hold the key to a connected marketing and service experience — and it’s in your customer data. On average, marketers use nine different tactics to collect data across the entire customer journey, with customer service data as their most popular tactic. Similarly, 81% of service agents say their CRM and its data is shared with sales and marketing. Why? A unified, connected marketing approach allows teams to use each other’s data to deliver targeted messages, personalized offers, and individualized support that resonate with customers at every stage of their journey. The majority of service agents (80%) say even better access to other departments’ data would improve their work.

 

It’s one thing to collect the data and analyze it. It’s another to turn the insights into action. Connected marketing depends on a centralized view of the customer. To access that, you must unlock data silos between departments and manage data on a single platform. This single view provides a holistic understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and interactions — identifying patterns, trends, and opportunities for improvement.

Imagine a customer receives a targeted email promoting a new product based on their recent browsing history and decides to make a purchase. If the customer faces an issue with the product and reaches out to customer service, the service agent may have limited access to the customer’s purchase history and marketing interactions. This siloed data prevents the service agent from understanding the customer’s full journey, leading to a disjointed experience.

If customer service data was integrated with marketing data, the service agent could access the customer's purchase history, browsing behavior, and past interactions. With this information, the agent could offer personalized solutions or even suggest complementary products. This connected approach turns a potentially negative interaction into an opportunity to deepen the customer relationship.

With connected marketing, businesses can build trust, loyalty, and advocacy that unlock new growth opportunities.

 

From marketing to support, Unified Conversations makes it easy to have two-way chats on WhatsApp with customers.

Step 1.

Keep: Acquire and retain customers for life.

Customer retention is the cornerstone of sustainable business growth. Acquiring new customers costs more than retaining existing ones, making loyalty and proactive support important. Companies are increasingly turning to strategies like account-based marketing (ABM) and loyalty programs for better customer acquisition and retention. Yet, many of these programs’ information sources remain disjointed — and so is the resulting customer experience.

Several factors hinder customer retention efforts. Disconnected customer experiences are a primary culprit, characterized by inconsistent messaging or service encounters across various channels. Slow resolution times for customer issues also erode loyalty, as do lapses in proactive engagement. In fact, 61% of service professionals say their organization addresses service issues proactively, but only 33% of customers agree that the typical company does this. When customers feel neglected or unsupported, they are more likely to seek alternatives.

Connected marketing offers a powerful solution to these challenges. By centralizing customer data and aligning marketing and service efforts, businesses can create seamless and personalized experiences. Let’s see what happens when marketing and service come together.

A customer on their mobile phone with a purchase confirmation for a coffee machine, and getting a personalized product recommendation for coffee

Connecting the dots.

To focus on customer retention, marketing and service must work in harmony. Marketing can use customer service insights to tailor campaigns and offers, while service teams can use marketing data to anticipate customer needs and provide more effective support. To build reliable customer retention, consider focusing on these key initiatives:

  • Pausing marketing promotions: Prevent customers with open support cases from receiving promotional materials that might heighten their issues. This type of mindful marketing demonstrates a deep understanding of the customer’s needs and creates a sense of care and consideration, showing them they are valued and heard.
  • Cross-sell and upsell opportunities: Based on purchase history or intent, use AI to send next-best-offer recommendations and personalized upsell offers at scale. These offers should be delivered across multiple channels to maximize reach and impact. Delivering cross-sell and upsell offers across channels ensures your messaging reaches customers wherever they are in their journey — whether it's through email campaigns, personalized WhatsApp messages, or targeted advertisements.
    However, the approach doesn’t end with the initial offer. AI can then deliver engagement indicators to service teams, enabling them to identify customers who may be receptive to additional offerings or upgrades. By using real-time insights and predictive analytics, service agents are empowered to proactively address customer needs and facilitate valuable interactions.
  • Reengagement and win-back campaigns: Reconnect with dormant customers, revive their interest, and win them back. By using data from service, marketers can better define precise audience segments for more targeted and effective efforts. Send personalized offers tailored to each segment’s preferences and behaviors.
    Whether it’s a special discount, exclusive promotion, or personalized recommendation, the goal is to reignite interest and incentivize action. But, the objective extends beyond transactional success. By creating experiences that resonate with your audience, you foster lasting relationships built on trust and mutual value.

Step 2.

Satisfy: Build customer happiness.

Delivering exceptional customer experiences is no longer a differentiator but a necessity. According to our “State of the Connected Customer” report, a whopping 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. Yet, only 32% of marketers are completely satisfied with how they use customer data to create relevant experiences, and keeping pace with customer expectations is service companies’ biggest challenge. So what creates this gap?
A customer talking on the phone with a customer service agent, showing their unified customer profile and their personal activity feed.

For one, inconsistent engagement across different channels confuses customers, creating a disjointed experience that diminishes satisfaction. The inability to use zero- and first-party data complicates personalization efforts, leading to irrelevant interactions that frustrate customers. And, limited understanding of customer segments and the inability to create them makes it difficult to deliver targeted messages. This results in impersonal experiences that fall short of customers’ expectations.

It’s hard to make everyone happy, but there are steps companies can take to emphasize customer satisfaction across marketing and service touchpoints.

 

80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

Connecting the dots.

When it comes to satisfaction, marketing and service teams should unite around the customer. In fact, 88% of service agents say they share accountability for customer satisfaction KPIs with sales and marketing teams. When marketing understands the challenges service teams face, they can create campaigns that reduce support inquiries. When service agents have insights into marketing goals, they can better anticipate customer needs and provide more enticing solutions. Together, they create a seamless customer experience that keeps customers happy and coming back for more — increasing operational efficiency and business growth all the while. Let’s look at a few ways you can do this.

  • Product reviews and customer surveys: Give customers a voice and follow up with a survey or post-purchase review. Two-way messaging prompts create meaningful dialogue and gather real-time insights from customers. Whether through SMS, chatbots, or social media messaging, it’s important to provide ways for customers to share their opinions and experiences on their terms.
  • Preference building: Use the insights from product reviews and customer surveys to inform future personalization and proactive service outreach. By understanding customers’ preferences, pain points, and priorities, you can tailor offerings, communications, and support initiatives to better meet customer needs and exceed their expectations. Take note of where they engage with you and be sure to communicate based on this preference.
  • Proactive, not just personalized journeys: By anticipating needs and addressing potential pain points before they arise, you can demonstrate commitment to exceptional service and customer satisfaction.

For example, use service data to better segment your customers by loyalty status or open customer service cases. Put this data into action and send personalized offers that resonate with each individual's preferences and purchase history.

Step 3.

Accelerate: Speed up delivery of customer benefits.

Time to value is all about how quickly a customer can start enjoying the benefits of a product or service. Simply put, people want results fast, and companies must keep up. Eighty-one percent of customers expect faster service and 73% expect better personalization as technology advances. Yet 69% of agents say balancing speed and quality is difficult. Lucky for marketers and service agents, AI can help businesses scale connected marketing efforts, speeding up delivery of customer benefits.
A young man working on their laptop with an abstracted window showing a journey builder journey

For marketing, a shorter time to value means customers quickly realize the benefits of a product or service, leading to positive word of mouth and increased customer acquisition. For service teams, accelerating time to value ensures customers are satisfied with their purchase and reduces the likelihood of support issues or returns.

Without a connected marketing strategy, accelerating time to value can quickly turn to accelerating time to leave the brand. Customers get frustrated when they can’t easily get what they need on their preferred channels. Additionally, if marketing and service teams lack a unified view of customer interactions, it becomes difficult to deliver timely messages and it’s not clear who should deliver them. When customers are expected to coordinate with multiple representatives across different messaging channels, it reduces efficiency and slows down response times, negatively impacting the customer’s relationship with the business and perception of value.

AI-powered predictive analytics can identify the most effective touchpoints for individual customers, ensuring they quickly grasp the product’s benefits with the right information on the right channel. In fact, 79% of service organizations are investing in AI. By automating routine tasks like lead qualification and customer onboarding, AI frees up human resources to focus on higher-value activities. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can also provide instant self-service support and guidance, fixing problems faster and preventing customer frustration. Let’s break down other tangible ways AI adds value to customer experiences.

 

79% of service organizations are investing in AI.

Connecting the dots.

Sometimes, simple alignment can help marketing and service teams move toward the same goal. When marketing provides clear and accurate information about product benefits, customers have a better understanding of how to use the product effectively. Service teams can provide valuable feedback to marketing on product features and usage challenges, helping to refine messaging and improve the overall customer experience. AI helps deepen this internal alignment.

AI can provide shared metrics, data-driven insights, and predictive analytics to foster collaboration between marketing and service teams. It can also automate transactional messages, such as order confirmations, shipping notifications, and password reset instructions. These AI initiatives help marketing and service teams manage marketing journeys and service touchpoints on one platform. This helps both teams work smarter, not harder, to deliver a superior customer experience.

  • A warm welcome with personalized onboarding: Use AI to deliver hyperpersonalized welcome journeys that address product benefits from the start. AI-powered customer segmentation and predictive analytics help businesses create tailored onboarding experiences that reduce future service case volume and improve customer satisfaction.
    Our Marketing Cloud journeys can be augmented with AI to dynamically adjust customer paths based on real-time behavior. Additionally, post-purchase surveys using AI can gather actionable feedback, informing future onboarding iterations and service improvements
  • Automated renewal journeys: Remind customers of upcoming renewals with personalized messages on the channel they engage with most often. By using AI-driven customer segmentation and behavior analysis, businesses can craft tailored renewal messages that resonate with individual preferences. These timely reminders, whether for subscriptions, maintenance, or upgrades, keep brands in the forefront and facilitate seamless interactions.
  • Personalized website experiences: Automatically add personalization to your website with tailored product recommendations, support resources, and next best actions based on customer behavior. Even anonymous visitors can benefit from AI-driven insights that guide them toward relevant information. This approach extends beyond the website, with AI-driven, open-time email personalization, which personalizes content at the moment an email is opened rather than when it’s sent.
 

The results are in. Learn what marketers and service professionals are saying about AI, data, and personalization.

Step 4.

Reduce: Decrease service center volume.

According to our "State of the Connected Customer" report, most customers (77%) expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company. The challenge with this expectation is the workload it adds to marketers and service agents.
Two customer service agents talking to each other and a window showing Einstein-powered Next Best Action options

Understanding a customer's full story is tough when information is scattered across different teams. This makes it harder for service agents to help people quickly and leaves customers repeating their problems to different people. The majority of customers (79%) expect consistency across departments, but 56% often have to repeat information to different representatives. On the flip side, marketers often have limited insight into the root causes of customer issues, making it difficult to address problems proactively. It wastes everyone’s time and service agents have to pay for it.

Imagine a strategy that exceeds customer expectations and solves problems faster while reducing service center volume. That’s a connected marketing and service experience.

Connecting the dots.

Effective communication and a shared commitment to customer satisfaction are essential for driving down service volumes and contributing to the overall customer experience. Both teams need access to a shared view of the customer to pinpoint trends and issues. By collaborating to understand the root causes of customer inquiries, they can proactively address problems through the initiatives below.

  • Self-service experiences: On average, self-service solves an estimated 54% of customer issues for organizations that use it. Seventy-two percent of customers have used self-service portals, and 55% have used self-service chatbots. Apply chatbot workflows to facilitate simple self-service transactions, like appointment booking and promotional redemption. However, do so in a way that considers the customer’s point of view. Over two-thirds of customers won’t use a company’s chatbot again after just one negative experience. Companies that prioritize good customer service don’t just grow their reputation — they grow their business.
  • Deflect inbound inquiries with personalized content: Anticipate your customers’ needs with proactive marketing and resources that leave them feeling valued. Automatically personalize touch points with support articles and educational content to deflect future problems.
  • Real-time, personalized care: Give agents real-time access to online behavioral history for individual customers so they can preemptively offer assistance. Agents can even be prompted to share a “next best offer” or recommend products to complement their purchases.

Get started with connected marketing and service.

Effective connected marketing begins with a clear vision for improving the overall customer experience. Companies often fall into the trap of trying to implement every feature at once, leading to delays and budget overruns. Prioritizing customer needs and focusing on core functionalities is crucial. To succeed in connected marketing, marketing and service teams must align efforts around the customer.

Salesforce’s platform facilitates this collaboration by providing a single source of truth for customer data, creating more personalized and engaging experiences. Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud can be instrumental in this process by providing the tools to gather and analyze customer data in one platform, allowing for rapid adjustments to marketing and service strategies.

Find your next steps.

A connected marketing and service experience cannot exist without first understanding the customer. By closely examining how customers interact with marketing and service teams, businesses can connect the dots and uncover powerful opportunities to differentiate themselves.
 
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More resources

 
Guide

Unlock trapped data and deliver personalized experiences with AI.

Solution Page

Connect experiences across marketing and service.

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Deliver best-in-class experiences with connected marketing.

 
 
 

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