Identity theft is the fastest-growing crime in the United States. In fact, one in four people have experienced identity theft. For those of you that fall into the unlucky 25%, you know that mitigating the impact of this invasion is much more complicated than simply canceling credit cards and monitoring your credit report.

That's where LifeLock comes in. For a small monthly fee, LifeLock helps protect your identity with the unique combination of detecting, alerting and restoring. But, when you're in the business of securing your customers' lives, building trust and rapport is critical to the bottom line of your business.

For LifeLock, communicating to their customers isn't enough. It's about managing the entire customer experience from top-of-funnel acquisition through providing world-class customer service.

Want to increase customer satisfaction and retention? We recently sat down with LifeLock executives Michael Hargis, Senior VP of Member Services and Jason Chitwood, VP of Database Marketing, to get their perspective on how service and marketing come together to provide a better customer experience for LifeLock members. Mike and Jason illustrate how amazing things can happen when you eliminate the barriers between marketing and service. Here are three key takeaways from our conversation.

1. Break down your silos because your customers expect it.

Your customers don't care if they're calling customer service or responding to an email offer. They expect you to know them and provide a consistent and personalized experience across the entire relationship.

Think about what you could do if you had a single view of your customer. You'd know every time they spoke with a sales agent. Every time they called customer service. You'd know their birthday, anniversary with your company, if they have kids, their preferred communication channel, their gender. Anything you gather about your customer you could leverage to provide highly customized interactions, regardless if the customer is speaking to a sales representative, customer service liaison, or opening an email.

That's LifeLock's vision. They're working toward a single view of their customer that can be accessed by marketing as well as service agents. So, if a customer calls a service representative, that representative knows what offers have been sent and can have an informed conversation that is tailored specifically to the customer's needs and pain points.

LifeLock marketers can then leverage service information to create highly-personalized offers that use dynamic content to speak directly to a customer's stated needs. Campaigns can be triggered based on likelihood to upgrade or attrit, for example.

This is only possible when you knock down your own silos and think about marketing beyond email and SMS alerts and service as more than responding to customer complaints. LifeLock knows the power this can provide and they're ultimately leveraging it to create a better experience for their customers.

2. Service and productivity are easy with the right partner.

With Salesforce, LifeLock has been able to integrate multiple service touch-points, and scale rapidly to meet the needs of its customers and business.

In just the first few months after implementing Service Cloud, LifeLock's compliance went from 80% to 90% and service agents were able to resolve cases 50% faster. Service levels went from around 11 days to 5.5 days and agent productivity exploded.

With its previous system, LifeLock manually assigned tickets. Now, the entire process is automated. The impact to the customer has been incredible with retention rates continuing to improve and the company's Net Promoter Scores have gone through the roof.

3. Never underestimate the power of educational content.

Your mom was right. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Nurture your relationship with your new customers and they're far less likely to have service complaints or leave you after your agreement is complete.

With Marketing Cloud, LifeLock created an onboarding journey for its new members designed to educate them about the basic features of their product and how they work. Then, LifeLock uses the data they have on their customers to understand whether or not the customer is using the full features of their products. Different communications are sent to customers based on how and if they're using these features. This educational approach helped mitigate service complaints and has meant greater customer retention.

LifeLock is also using this forward-thinking, educational approach to nurture prospective customers. When a prospect fills out a form on the LifeLock website or speaks to a representative in the call center, they are sent educational information that can help lead them toward an eventual purchase.

LifeLock understands that the future of marketing and service isn't about leveraging SMS, push notifications or video chat. In the end, it's all about building relationships with customers and trust in your products and people. It really is that simple.