In the first installment of this two part series, I defined the growing need for leading organizations to engage customers across the entire lifecycle. Two of our practice leads, Tom Gaydos and Bob Furniss, gave their thoughts on how to successfully align Marketing and Service to drive customer engagement at every touchpoint.

I'm joined again by Tom and Bob, this time to examine how Marketing and Service can measure their efforts, and how their alignment will change customer engagement strategies in the future, as companies integrate the two departments to get closer than ever to customers.

BG: What are key performance indicators that both departments need to measure the effectiveness of their joint efforts?

TG: Measure the effectiveness of the messages generated by support and their downstream effects. If post-ticket surveys are being sent via the marketing automation tool, look to measure and improve the rates of delivery, opens, clicks, and completed survey conversions. For system alerts or other critical messages, look at how many customers took the desired action or acknowledged the alert. Consider other ways to communicate information such as SMS messaging. Add specific questions to any customer satisfaction surveys that focus around communication, such as, "How are you doing? How would you prefer to receive our messages? Is our messaging relevant or helpful?" Examine whether effective messaging is having any impact on other metrics such as MTTR or volume of calls about a specific topic.

BF: As I mentioned before, we collect a lot of data in customer Service. It is important that Marketing and Service work together to manage, analyze, and understand the customer journey.

An example of not listening: If I have called in three times in the last three weeks to complain about a product, it might not be the best time to send me an email promoting a similar product.

An example of listening well: If I call Service to see ask about the next-level product, and they describe the functionality that the next version will offer, now is a great time for Marketing to engage. With Service Cloud, companies can now track data not available in the past — we can track the customer journey across many channels. We recently worked with a client that has opened seven channels for service. Being able to tie phone, to email, to social, has changed the marketplace forever.

BG: How do you see customer engagement evolving as a result of alignment between Marketing and Service?

TG: The sharing of information between Marketing and Service has really just begun in terms of being able to automate the results of such a collaboration and truly act on the data in a meaningful way. One of the areas I see becoming a major measurement between both Marketing and Service is sentiment. Sentiment is sometimes difficult to measure or predict, but I believe that should be one of the next major quantification goals. Be it by dispositioning each call that Sales or Service has with a customer, measuring the sentiment of social interaction with a tool like Salesforce Social Studio, Oracle Social Cloud, or SpredFast. Likely a combination of many data points, sentiment towards an organization can be a major determining factor in the acceptance of offers, likelihood to be open for advocacy opportunities, or even the expected attitude of a customer logging an incoming service call. Lead and customer scoring are great for certain purposes. But sentiment scoring, if measured accurately, could be as important a factor as exists within predictive analytics from a customer service standpoint.

BF: As a customer, I want you to know me — my preferences, my wants and my needs. And to use that knowledge to provide quality service. Most importantly, I want that to occur on the channel that I choose. I think this level of intimacy will just continue to evolve. As you know me more, you should be able to provide more options for who I am — sharing knowledge and self-service options before I even know I need it. Marketing and Service organizations both have enormous amounts of data about the customer; I think in the future we will see more and more use of that data, for the benefit of the company — but more importantly, for the good of the customer.

How will you engage customers across their lifecycle? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Want to connect with Bob or Tom? Tweet @BobFurniss and @ThomasGaydos. You can also continue the conversation with Bob, who will be speaking on a webcast about Onmi-Channel Customer Service on May 28th.