What does it mean to be of service, and when can it be called effective? Although the exact answer will vary depending on many factors, the end goal is always to leave a positive experience when a customer interacts with your products & services.
So how can you make sure that it happens? One of the ways is by taking care of your team. There is a direct correlation between employees’ experience at your company and that of your customers. Therefore, aiming at helping your team become more effective positively affects your customers' perception and their overall experience.
Customers are not buying just products anymore- they’re buying whole experiences, and good customer service is a huge factor that influences the overall experience. As a result, it stopped being an additional aspect to the buying process and became the main commodity instead- with 67% of customers saying they’d pay extra to have a better experience when making a purchase (Salesforce, 2022).
That is why making sure that customer service is on the highest level possible is in the companies’ best interest. Fortunately, Salesforce offers a variety of tools focused on precisely that. One of them is Service Cloud- a customer service management solution that focuses on everything related to customer service in the cloud. It’s a tool meant to help with the automation of service processes, streamlining the workflows and finding the right topics and experts to provide the best support to customer service agents. Its main purpose is to create one-to-one relationships with every customer via different devices and channels.
So let’s take a look at what features we can expect when embarking on a journey with Service Cloud:
Audience & Channels
Each customer has preferred channels of communication. The key is to ideally focus on channels that allow the customer to provide structured data first, for example, with web forms instead of email, and then slowly expand into capabilities that reduce incoming cases and promote self-service like portals, knowledge & chatbots.
Expectations & Communication
One of the easiest ways to improve customer service engagements is to communicate clear expectations and pro-actively update them along the way. Having predefined email templates or quick texts ready for automated responses/updates will significantly improve the customer experience.
Details & Routing
When the customer does contact customer service, all details are recorded in cases and displayed in the Service Console. Ideally, these should be routed automatically to agents based on availability, capacity and skills using omnichannel instead of more static options like assignment rules.
Priority & Resolution
Quickly assessing which Cases require attention first will allow agents to be more effective & reduce resolution time. This can be achieved by utilizing entitlements & milestones to set the right priority based on impact and urgency.
Analyse & Adapt
Lastly, to ensure your customer service engagements remain effective, you need analytics & data. Luckily Salesforce offers a great set of Customer Service dashboards & reports as a starting point to becoming more data-driven.
These are just a few of the benefits that you can gain from using Service Cloud, and if you’d like to know more about it or any other Salesforce tools, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
