• by Susan Marshall , March 5, 2013

It’s a known fact. The correlation between customer experience and loyalty is undeniable. More than half of your customers already use social media for customer service, and by the end of 2013, 80% of companies will use social networks for customer service.

As marketers, we know that it’s easier to keep a customer than recruit a new one, but it is astonishing how little time and effort many brands spend on customer experience marketing.

The reason? Deep collaboration across all areas of the business makes execution difficult. Customer experience touches product development, interactive, customer support, retail and operations.

“Companies with higher CXi scores tend to have more customers who will buy from them again, who won’t take their business elsewhere and who will recommend them to a friend,” according to a March Forrester Research report: The Business Impact of Customer Experience, 2012.

Forrester noted: “The effect on revenue can range from $15 million for retailers to as much as $788 million for wireless service providers whose extremely large subscriber bases mean that even a small percentage change in repeat purchases translates into a very large dollar value.”

Social media is instant and can be amplified — good or bad. It’s the first place your customers will go when they are ecstatic with your service or when you let them down. If you set a precedent of being always available and responsive, your customers will also use this channel to ask everyday questions.

What an opportunity! These small, frequent interactions enable you to build more intimate relationships with your customers and amplify a good customer experience or defuse a bad one, preventing nasty comments on Twitter and Facebook. Conversely, they are more likely to let all friends and followers about good experiences.

Isn’t it time you invest in social media as your new customer service portal? Technology makes it easier to collaborate across teams by providing workflow solutions for claiming, assigning and managing tweets and posts. Pre-approved content and approval systems help brands maintain control over interactions, and reporting helps brands better understand the impact their social interactions are having on the business.

Your customers are already there. Your company could be missing out on thousands, if not millions of dollars in lost revenue by not being there, too.