90% of Americans consider customer service when choosing a company for its products or services. With review platforms like Google and Yelp as well as social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter, customers can easily conduct research on brands. One bad customer experience can have far-reaching effects and cost much more than one customer.
And don’t forget about customer retention. 89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after positive customer service experiences. Good customer service is paramount, and it’s only getting more important.
But how do you ensure quality customer service throughout a customer’s life cycle? There are so many points of communication, and unfortunately, potential points of failure.
Salesforce has created a solution for this. While typically thought of as a CRM, Salesforce has expanded to a massive suite of powerful tools. The most helpful for customer service is its Salesforce Service Cloud which aims to provide personalized, timely customer service to improve customer happiness, engagement, and satisfaction. When paired with other clouds, it can have an even bigger impact. The platform as a whole helps you achieve better customer experiences in eight ways:
1. Create a Customer-Oriented Journey Mindset
A customer-oriented journey mindset focuses on delivering a better customer experience, from first brand awareness through the entire customer relationship. This cultural shift should center your focus on the customer first, not your product or service. With processes within your whole organization transitioned toward customer needs, your entire team will be working for the same goals — the customer’s success and satisfaction — instead of in silos. But where do you start?
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder can help you map out the major stages of your customer relationship and then build and deliver personalized messages along the way. Customers start their relationship with your brand feeling valued, appreciated, and supported. The establishment of a strong working relationship is the first step in providing exemplary customer service.
2. Connect with and Understand Your Customers
Customers don’t receive information passively anymore. They want and seek out live and real-time access to help and information.
Salesforce Service Cloud has helped the transformation of customer experiences by building communication channels for live agents. Companies can have direct conversations via live sessions that better understand client issues and how to implement solutions. Letting customers communicate with a service agent via your website or mobile app will reduce calls to help desks and help resolve customer issues faster.
Salesforce’s LiveAgent real-time chat functionality is one of the most-used support channels and has the highest customer satisfaction of any Salesforce channel. And even better: agents can be more productive by holding multiple conversations at once.
3. Keep Communication Honest and Manage Expectations
One of the main reasons for customer dissatisfaction is when a service or product fails to live up to expectations. Companies need to deploy careful marketing and communication strategies to ensure this doesn’t happen.
- Create consistency in your brand voice throughout your content and share transparent information about what your company can and can’t accomplish
- Mention any service process or product limitations and how you will address them
Keep customers in the loop, especially during issues that take more than one step to resolve, through honest communications strategies like these.
4. Manage CSR Productivity
Successful customer satisfaction has a behind-the-scenes story, providing seamless and efficient management options for CSR productivity.
The Salesforce Service Cloud Lightning Console gives agents a centralized customer view to manage cases faster, track customer history, and view dashboards without switching tabs or software.
Salesforce Service Cloud helps reduce operational noise with features like:
- Skills-based email-to-case routing that progressively responds to customers’ queries on a variety of channels
- Workload management reports that allow supervisors and service managers real-time views of service teams’ activity
- Agent productivity tools to help with organization and time management
With a clearer focus on how to better serve customers and technology to streamline the process, providing exemplary customer service becomes much easier.
5. Clear Communications Between Internal Departments
Having a centralized platform can help teams better communicate and collaborate. Salesforce Service Cloud integrates with other Salesforce applications for marketing and sales. Working across departments in the Salesforce platform gives the entire organization a complete and robust view of each customer. You can ensure that nothing and nobody ever gets lost in the shuffle when addressing customer needs or concerns. Even better, this allows personalized client communications to increase engagement and satisfaction.
6. Reduce Case Time and Effort
Salesforce Service Cloud balances workloads between agents and pushes work to the most appropriate team members with the skills and certifications required to solve the service problem. The platform’s Omni-channel Routing feature allows you to route service work intelligently so customers can get the answers they need sooner.
7. Give Customers Control with Self-Service Access
Customers are no longer satisfied with either going to a physical location or calling a help desk to resolve common issues. They want the ability to inform themselves and resolve their problems quickly on their own time.
With Salesforce, companies can offer knowledge centers for customer problem-solving without the need for an agent. And this delivers real results — businesses who provide “self-serve communities” have bolstered faster problem-solving and have seen a 31% increase in case deflection. Happier customers plus fewer CSRs needed!
The Service Cloud Communities feature also allows customers to add their knowledge and insight to help improve products and services while building brand loyalty.
8. Analyze Customer Insights Through Wave Analytics
Small businesses and their agents will make more informed decisions by knowing their customer’s journey and acting on analytics trends to resolve cases faster. Agents need to quickly diagnose service issues, drill into customer and case history, create cases, update case history, and collaborate with all relevant department teams.
Salesforce Wave Analytics is a business intelligence (BI) platform that allows users to drill down into key parts of the business data analysis with only a few clicks.
Adding the Wave Analytics feature to Salesforce Service Cloud lets you see all the workspace analytics you need to make better decisions. Companies can optimize customer journeys and get answers faster using visual displays, centralized KPIs, and service delivery metrics.
How to Roadmap and Deploy Your Customer-Oriented Journey
Your journey to customer-oriented success does not have to be complicated. Salesforce can offer your business many features and options, and a trusted partner can offer innovative consulting concentrated on your goals and success. Our team at Soliant Consulting partners with clients seeking better customer service models and strategic solutions on the Salesforce platform. We specialize in delivering strategic business outcomes and helping our clients provide positive, personalized brand experiences for their customers. Contact our team to learn how we can help your company do the same.
