Marketing and Customer Service.
Customer Service and Marketing. 
For some odd reason, these two are inseparable, and go in hand in hand. As Pamela Vaughan mentions in her blog post, these two “should go together like milk and cookies”

She outlined 7 reasons they these two MUST go together as such:

1) For Better Social Media Support

2) For Content Creation Ideas

3) For a Deeper Understanding of Buyer Personas

4) For Setting Customer Expectations

5) For Unified Messaging & Communications

6) For PR/Marketing Promotion of Customer Success & Happiness

7) For Informing Product Marketing Initiatives

These reasons without explaining further, sounds pretty basic and self-explanatory. Personally, the points that stuck out to me the most was “Deeper Understanding of Buyer Personas” and “Setting Customer Expectations”.

As a person who has worked in a retail store, I have experience with being the first hand direct contact with the customers. If I learned anything from my experience in retail is that understanding and listening to the customers is crucial to the success of any business. For example, I can be very knowledgeable about the products I’m selling, but if I don’t know what the customer’s need is there is no use. The ability to connect and understand a customer’s need is so crucial that even if I do not have the best knowledge about the products I’m trying sell, the customer will leave with a positive attitude.

Similarly, setting customer expectations also means I am creating a lifetime customer. Even if today or next week a customer might not purchase a product, giving her the best experience and customer service will encourage her to make a purchase sometime in the future.

Although my experience in retail gives a very limited perspective on the operations of the corporation side of a business, I believe a lot of the marketing done is no use without excellent customer service.