Succeeding at customer service measurement requires establishing clear metrics to measure against various benchmarks. Measurement ensures that organizations treat customers with respect. Anticipating the problems they will encounter also enables customer service operations that don’t always have to put out fires. Instead, they can be used to proactively increase customer satisfaction, and that makes everyone happy.

Master customer service operations — customer on-boarding, knowledge management, workforce management, asset management — to maximize customer satisfaction, cross-selling, and revenues.

The secret to creating an excellent customer experience isn’t so secret: segment customers by service levels, set and reinforce expectations, proactively fix problems, and practice up-selling and cross-selling.

Do your sales managers dream of creating an excellent customer experience? In this age of instantly crowdsourced consumer dissatisfaction, keeping customers happy is a mandatory step in not just retaining your customers, but being able to land new ones. So listen up, sales: you’re competing based on the customer experience. Time to do something about it.

To maximize sales productivity and revenues, you’d think most organizations would create a written plan to guide sales planning—highlighting the steps salespeople should pursue for any call, defining the top skills its salespeople need, or even maintaining an integrated view of customer contact information. But most don’t.

How can your marketing group be more effective? Start by mastering the art of event management.