Your marketing team just spent thousands of dollars acquiring that customer, but your customer service destroyed your brand perception in just a few minutes.
Marketing departments measure campaign performance, content engagement and conversion rates, while customer service is considered a separate operational function. This organizational separation creates a fundamental disconnect: marketing builds brand promises that customer service activities must deliver. When these activities fail to deliver on their promises, every marketing dollar becomes less effective.
The brand gap that no one measures
Up to 29% of consumers cite poor customer experiences as a reason for leaving a brand, while 80% say their experience with a brand is as important as its products and services. Yet traditional marketing continues to track cost per acquisition, CLV, and brand sentiment, while customer service tracks average handle time, first contact resolution, and ticket volume. These metrics rarely match, even though they measure different aspects of the same customer relationship.
This measurement gap hides a simple truth: every customer service interaction is a brand moment. One European retail brand realized it needed to innovate its customer service operations to meet changing customer expectations. To stay competitive, the company enabled digital customer experience and conducted a detailed review of its processes and systems, ultimately seeking a partner to support a full digital transformation.
Working with Transcom, the brand implemented AI-powered support, omnichannel service options, system integrations through Zendesk, and redesigned agent workflows. Within six months, self-service diverted 53% of customer contacts, AI resolved 71% and average handle time decreased by 23%.
These operational gains translated directly into marketing results: the impact of live chat on overall customer satisfaction increased by 20%, meaning each service interaction strengthened rather than eroded brand perception.
Dig deeper: why customer experience is the ultimate growth strategy in 2026
When operations become a marketing lever
Customer service activities create brand perception moments that campaigns can’t buy. Three operational capabilities directly determine whether your brand builds loyalty or blows customers away.
Resolution speed as a driver of brand perception
Speed keeps customers. Research shows that 32% of consumers leaving a brand after a single bad experience – no repeat failures, just one. The speed of the solution drives greater retention than most acquisition campaigns ever will. Every hour that an issue remains unresolved gives customers time to compare alternatives, post public complaints, or decide that your brand isn’t worth the effort.
Channel availability as customer expectation management
You place ads on Instagram, send emails, post on TikTok and text promotions. Then customers need help and discover that they can only reach you by phone between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. That disconnect frustrates customers because it exposes the gap between your marketing sophistication and operational reality.
Omnichannel support means customers can reach you through the same channels they found you on. Consistency between where you market and where you service eliminates the “we’re everywhere until you need us” problem that undermines brand credibility.
Self-service as brand autonomy
Marketing promises customer empowerment. Operations prove whether it is real. Transcom’s approach found that redirecting customer contacts through self-service tools and solving problems with AI bots reduces the need for human intervention, allowing customers to experience greater autonomy. They can solve problems on their own schedule, without waiting. The operational ability to support self-service makes the marketing message of customer empowerment tangible.
Dig deeper: AI only improves customer service if it supports people, not replaces them
What marketing leaders can actually change
Stop treating customer service as someone else’s responsibility. These operational decisions directly determine whether your marketing investments build the brand – or burn the budget.
Build operational capacity before campaign scale
Marketing campaigns can generate traffic faster than the service infrastructure can support it. You acquire customers that your operations can’t properly serve, turning acquisition gains into retention losses.
Before you scale up spend, ask yourself: Can our support team handle 50% more queries? Do our systems provide context when customers contact us? Can AI handle routine requests without human intervention? Infrastructure makes growth possible. Without this, marketing success leads to service failures.
Keep statistics that predict customer behavior
Average handle time tells you call duration, not satisfaction. Likewise, the first contact solution tells you about completion rates, not whether customers felt heard.
Track service metrics that predict behavior: satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS) of service interactions, repeat contact rates, and resolution satisfaction. These reveal whether operations build or erode the relationships that marketing creates.
Dig deeper: why 2026 is the year the customer experience must change
Making marketing promises operationally realistic
A $50,000 campaign that acquires 1,000 customers costs $50 per acquisition. If poor service causes 30% to leave within six months, the actual cost per retained customer rises to $71. Marketing spend doesn’t change, but operational failures make it less effective.
Service activities act as multipliers for marketing investments. Strong operations make every marketing dollar work harder, while weak operations force brands to spend more to replace the customers they lose.
Therefore, customer service activities determine whether a brand builds loyalty or loses customers. This distinction is often more important than the creativity of the campaign or the quality of the content.
Marketing leaders who understand this monitor campaign performance and assess whether activities can deliver on marketing promises, whether service channels align with marketing efforts and whether operational capabilities support the brand image.
Your customer service activities currently determine brand perception. Marketing strategy takes this reality into account or ignores it until customers force the conversation.
Dig deeper: Trust can’t be automated, which is why it’s important
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Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the supervision of the editors and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. The contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of it Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
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