Loyalty has long been the ultimate aspiration of marketers and customer experience managers. But it remains ever elusive—difficult to get and even harder to keep. In fact, when Accenture conducted its Global Consumer Survey earlier this year, polling more than 5,800 consumers in 17 countries about their experiences with 10 industries, it found that only 20 percent of those consumers feel loyal to the retailers they do business with.

Some experts say that social media is a major culprit in keeping loyalty at arm's length, suggesting that it has increased consumers' brand promiscuity. Others say that it also has sidetracked some marketers, who have been overly focused on acquiring Facebook "likes" and responding to every tweet in Twitter, instead of using social media as the loyalty-building tool it can be. "Loyalty is all about getting to customer acquisition and that's a set of goals that will never change. What will change is how you get there," says Mark Friedman, CMO of SoundBite Communication.