If a business is an orchestra, then every department is its own instrument. When teams work in isolation, the result is simply noise. When everyone unites around shared goals, beautiful music is made. And there’s no sweeter harmony than what’s created through collaboration between customer service and marketing.
According to a Q4 2024 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, the top item consumers want companies to prioritize on social media in 2025 is personalized customer care. People want customer service teams to meet them where they are—and that’s on social.
Meeting these evolving expectations isn’t a checkbox activity; it’s an investment in a long-term strategic partnership. This article explores how marketing and customer service teams can collaborate today to deliver better customer experiences tomorrow.
Why your marketing and customer service departments need to work together
In a competitive market, the only way to win is to be customer obsessed. When marketers collaborate with customer service teams, they get unparalleled insights into the driving forces behind customer experiences. Grounding marketing strategies in customer feedback elevates initiatives big and small.
Customer service teams, on the other hand, gain opportunities to amplify messaging around key pain points, helping reduce case volume and freeing them to address more complex customer needs.
If that doesn’t make the case, don’t worry—we’re just scratching the surface. Here are three more benefits businesses gain from close collaboration between customer service and marketing teams.
It’s what consumers expect
A Q1 2024 Sprout Pulse Survey shows that 80% of consumers strongly or somewhat agree they use social media for customer service needs more now than they did a year ago. This number goes up to 89% for Gen Z.
We’re at the start of the social customer care boom. As Gen Z and Gen Alpha preferences evolve, consumer expectations for social customer service will grow—driven not only by demand but also by brands that innovate and set new standards.
It helps each team reach their respective goals
Increasing the flow of customer feedback and insights between customer service and marketing teams elevates the performance of both functions. Just ask the team at Instant Brands.
The company boasts a renowned portfolio of seven kitchenware brands, including Corelle, Pyrex and Instant Pot. Managing customer service for such a diverse lineup requires constant innovation guided by consumer insights.
“The collaboration between our departments is vital for the business,” says Social Media Manager Camille Pessoa. “Working this closely together is how we achieve the success and goals that we strive for.”
It surfaces opportunities for surprise and delight
When customer service and marketing teams work together, they can better identify and act on opportunities for surprise and delight.
For example, when a member of the Instant Pot Facebook Group shared that her beloved appliance had been destroyed after a hurricane, the Instant Brands team worked quickly to send her replacement, along with their well wishes.
Moments like these can solidify your brand’s place in customers’ hearts and minds. They also create valuable user-generated content opportunities that can help you gain new fans, too.
How to align marketing and customer service teams
Before exploring ways to collaborate, let’s cover two key ways to lay the foundation for smoother teamwork between marketing and customer service teams.
Shared resources
Brand guidelines, promotional calendars, strategy briefs—the resources that keep marketing team members on the same page can also do the same for your teammates in customer service.
Simple things, like providing an advanced look at your social media calendar, can give teams time to identify opportunities or flag potential issues proactively. Think about it: the content you share can significantly impact the number of service inquiries you receive on the platform.
For example, this TikTok on the do’s and don’ts of owning an Instant Pot received over 505,000 views.
It’s an incredibly helpful piece of content that was bound to generate quite a bit of engagement. Without a proper heads up on when and where it would be published, the Instant Brands social customer service team wouldn’t have been prepared to address the 100+ comments received on the video.
By collaborating with your customer service team, you provide them with an opportunity to review scheduled content for clarity. Leveraging their firsthand knowledge of customers, they can proactively address potential issues before they arise.
Shared tools
While eliminating data silos may seem like an obvious choice, the reality is that investing in new shared tools takes a lot of work. It involves the challenge of aligning stakeholders on priorities and the complex task of integrating new and existing systems—no easy feat, indeed.
However, it’s important to remember that connected tools lead to reduced operational hassles for teams and result in superior customer experiences. You simply can’t argue with those results. Just ask the team at Instant Brands.
Customers talk about us on social media all the time, and that can be positive or negative. What matters is that we address them as fast as we can. That’s why Sprout’s integration with Salesforce is so crucial for us. It keeps us connected with the service agents that handle escalations so we can extinguish fires with minimal risk.
Camille Pessoa
Social Media Manager, Instant Brands
By investing in a social media management platform that integrates with Salesforce Service Cloud, the Instant Brands team gets the most out of both tools. It’s an investment that benefits everyone—leaders, agents and customers.
9 ways marketing and customer service teams can work together
Making the most of every customer care opportunity begins by strengthening the bond between your marketing and customer service teams. As your working relationship deepens, it’ll become easier for both parties to identify new ways to wow customers.
If you want to make cross-functional collaboration a well-worn reflex for all your team members, we’ve got four tips to help you along the way.
Bonus: Great customer service strategies aren’t built in a vacuum. Use this free social media customer service training deck to align marketing and service teams around a defined set of shared goals.
1. Align on shared goals
When you’re just beginning to build connections with colleagues from other teams, it can feel like they’re speaking a different language. Everything—timelines, rituals, commonly used phrases and acronyms—can feel utterly foreign, even though you all work at the same company.
Aligning on goals is the fastest way to break down the barrier. Once teams are looking at a shared goal, all the work that goes into getting there makes a lot more sense.
For Pessoa’s team, social media response time is the top priority. “I work with a team of six moderators that rotate in for 24/7 service. We try to maintain an average first response time of four hours for general engagements, and one business day for reviews.”
There’s also quite a bit of quality assurance work that goes into ensuring all conversations meet the Instant Brands standard. “I usually pick three conversations at random, then analyze them against our customer service rubric,” says Pessoa.
These goals enhance outcomes for both teams, giving everyone something to rally around. When customer service teams are able to meet and exceed their service delivery standards, marketers reap the benefits of heightened customer satisfaction.
2. Assign roles and responsibilities
Businesses without dedicated social customer service teams often face bottlenecks when it comes to managing social media engagement. Marketers are typically equipped to handle standard issues and frequently asked questions, but more complicated inquiries can gum up processes for both teams.
To successfully navigate these complex issues, you’ll need to outline clear, cross-functional roles and responsibilities for the channel.
Of course, there’s no one size fits all approach to defining these roles and responsibilities. For maximum efficacy, they need to be tailored to your business. If you’re having trouble determining what that might look like, here are some thought starters to guide your approach:
- On average, how many messages do you receive across your social profiles per month? Does your social team have the capacity to handle those messages? If not, what percentage are they able to resolve on their own?
- What are the most common types of questions, complaints or comments your team receives on social?
- What situations often call for case escalations on social? In your current processes, when do you tap in your customer service team for help?
The answers to these questions can help define clear roles for each team. If you’re using Social Customer Care by Sprout Social, they can also guide the setup of your User Teams.
User Teams in Sprout function like dedicated support queues. Each Team serves as a queue for care members to claim cases through Sprout’s Case Management tool. Teams can be organized by geographic location, skills or any other customer service tier.
3. Embed AI and automation across workflows
Social inboxes can be chaotic. Unlike traditional support channels, social platforms allow anyone to tag your brand or send a DM about anything. To manage this effectively, marketers and customer service agents must work together to triage and organize messages that need a response.
That’s where AI steps in. According to a Q1 2024 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, 73.5% of consumers are comfortable with brands using AI to deliver faster social customer service—and smart brands are taking notice. Relying on manual prioritization risks falling short of customer expectations.
AI-powered tools cut through the noise, helping you focus on what matters. For example, Sprout’s Sentiment for Messages feature relies on a machine learning technique called a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to assess inbound messages for positive, negative or neutral sentiment.
These classifications enable you to prioritize and respond to messages with precision and speed. You can even integrate Sentiment for Messages into Automated Rules, streamlining your workflow to deliver timely, personalized responses and build stronger brand loyalty.
4. Eliminate data silos
Now that you have your roles and responsibilities outlined, it’s time to ask the tough questions. How will your social team pass cases over to their colleagues in customer service?
Findings from a Q3 2023 Sprout Social Pulse Survey reveal the biggest challenges customer care professionals face when providing service on social media are largely related to routing. These hurdles revolve around the significant time invested in manual tasks and the insufficient access to comprehensive customer information for agents.
To address these challenges, the same Pulse Survey found 45% of customer care leaders intend to invest in integrated technology that enables their teams to collaborate within unified systems. It’s a solution that Instant Brands has relied on to limit confusion when working between teams.
“We use Sprout Social to manage our social customer service strategy,” says Pessoa. “It allows us to address issues in a single platform, rather than having to switch between email or Microsoft Teams to resolve a case.”
5. Create spaces for live collaboration
A refined approach to social customer care is achieved through ongoing two-way feedback between customer service and marketing teams. As team members become more familiar with their roles in the process, it’s crucial to provide them with spaces to surface opportunities for improvement.
A weekly stand-up or a shared channel on your preferred communication tool can provide a forum for raising questions, concerns and collaborative action items.
By addressing issues in a shared space, other customer service agents can learn in real time, helping to prevent knowledge silos.
6. Partner in identifying user-generated content
Your next top-performing post might be hiding in your social inbox. Every day, users—from casual TikTokers to household-name influencers—log on to rave about the products they love.
This user-generated content (UGC) serves as invaluable social proof and can be repurposed for paid ads, email campaigns or even your website—but only if you spot them.
That’s why it’s essential to train customer service agents on spotting UGC. By equipping them with examples of what to look for, you increase their ability to identify and flag high-value content, ensuring these hidden gems make their way to the right marketing teammate.
7. Develop a surprise and delight strategy
Going above and beyond for customers can create lasting positive impressions that create customers for life. Customer service teams are uniquely positioned to identify the surprise and delight opportunities that exist within everyday interactions. When a customer mentions a celebration or shows enthusiasm for a product, that’s your moment to act.
With support from marketing, service agents can turn these moments into personalized experiences that resonate. Marketing can provide tools like discount codes, exclusive content or small gifts to help create these memorable touches. This collaboration ensures a consistent brand experience while amplifying the impact of your efforts.
8. Establish real-time data feedback loop
Customer service interactions provide a wealth of valuable insights. The case management solution you use for social media captures critical data that can help enhance customer experiences.
For instance, teams using Sprout Social for social customer care can use the Case Activity Report for a holistic view of their social care efforts. This report highlights trends in incoming message volume and tracks the rate and speed of actions taken by your team.
Regularly reviewing this data can lead to operational efficiencies, such as optimizing how you staff agents for social customer service or identifying opportunities to improve response times during peak hours. By closing the feedback loop, both marketing and customer service teams can make smarter decisions and deliver a better overall customer experience.
9. Develop resources for cross-team training
Social customer service is constantly evolving—new platforms emerge, best practices change and your team’s needs shift. To keep marketing and customer service teams aligned, create a centralized hub for social customer service training, such as a wiki, knowledge base or shared drive with key resources.
Keeping training materials up-to-date is essential to staying ahead. As teams grow and change, a central hub ensures everyone has access to consistent information, making onboarding smoother and helping everyone stay aligned. This approach not only saves time and resources but also eliminates the need to reinvent the wheel with each new team member.
3 examples of customer service marketing using Sprout Social
The right tools can take the collaboration between your marketing and customer service team from “good” to “great”. Here’s how three brands enhance their approach with Sprout.
Instant Brands
You can only take social customer care issues so far in a public forum before you need to escalate things to a private channel. Without an escalation management strategy in place, you risk customers sharing sensitive information—like home addresses, phone numbers and account information—in a non-secure environment.
To provide seamless, omnichannel care, Instant Brands relies on Sprout Social’s global partnership with Salesforce. “We’re always generating cases with Sprout for Salesforce. We get quite a few requests for Instant Pot and Pyrex—usually things like requests for replacements or product defects. To solve those issues, we need to be able to ask for consumer information which has to be done in Salesforce.”
Salesforce
Salesforce understands the importance of exceptional customer experiences—both online and offline. To meet and exceed customer expectations on social, they rely on Sprout Social.
Social media engagement plays a vital role in Salesforce’s flagship conference, Dreamforce, which hosts over 40,000 in-person attendees and millions online. Whether attendees are on the ground in San Francisco or tuning in remotely, Salesforce uses Sprout to bring the energy and conversation of the event to its social audience.
Sprout’s tools, like the Smart Inbox, help Salesforce engage fans across 150+ social channels at Dreamforce, and year-round. By understanding when their audience is online and how they prefer to connect, Salesforce ensures meaningful interactions that strengthen customer relationships.
Since adopting Sprout, Salesforce has also streamlined operations, saving over 12,000 hours through the automation of repetitive tasks—enabling their team to focus on delivering standout customer experiences.
Sprout Social
At Sprout, we don’t just talk about raising the bar for social customer care—we’re committed to bringing that vision to life for our own customers, too.
The Inbox Activity report provides a detailed view of our social care efforts, including hourly insights into when response times peak and dip. In late 2022, an analysis of the report revealed an opportunity to improve response times during targeted support hours (6 p.m. to 8 a.m. CT).
By pinpointing periods where response times were higher than desired, we identified a need to expand our after-hours social coverage. This insight led to a strategic overhaul of our agent staffing approach, resulting in a 55% decrease in average response time.
Customer service and marketing teams do better together
When marketing and customer service teams join forces, they create a positive impact that can benefit an entire business, from sales to product and beyond. But the biggest winner in this partnership is the customer, which makes it even better.
Use what you’ve learned in this article to bring this collaboration to life. When you’re ready to roll out your new approach, use our social media customer service training deck. It’s designed to help your support agents master all the nuances of delivering exceptional care on social media, so they can create better customer experiences.
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