services  .  Change the Game of your Professional Services Firm with Salesforce Service Cloud

Change the Game of your Professional Services Firm with Salesforce Service Cloud

Pro Salesforce Header

When delivering excellent customer service, your aim should be to conduct productive and pleasant interactions with customers. Customers highly appreciate if the provider of professional services understands them, saving them to keep explaining their problems repeatedly to different representatives. Thus, your focus should be on enhancing customer experience by all means, and using Salesforce Service Cloud functionalities can enable you to achieve that. 

Customer service representatives always try to keep customers engaged, for which they can require tools and features to help them understand customers well. Using Service Cloud is one way to provide reps with everything they need to engage with customers effectively and gather their concerns regarding the professional service they need or have issues with.

The effectiveness of Salesforce Service Cloud can be better understood when we evaluate its features and capabilities. So, in this blog, we’ll cover Service Cloud’s capabilities that could transform professional services firms. 

Top Features of Salesforce Service Cloud for Professional Services Firms

Deploying Salesforce is a way to access Service Cloud, a core component of Salesforce that has changed how businesses manage and deal with their customers. 

So, let’s look at some capabilities of Salesforce Service Cloud that have been changing how customer service teams handle customers to achieve their satisfaction. 

1. End-to-End Case Management

Service Cloud allows case management for customer-facing support agents to deliver efficient service to customers at all times and across multiple touchpoints. Agents could access all information on their screens relevant to the customer they’re dealing with. This enables the reps to stay updated on the journey of the customer.  

When all service reps have access to customer data, the case can be handled by anyone at any time. Service Cloud even allows the team to automate workflows for case management with low-code or no-code approaches. 

2. Omnichannel Assistance

Service Cloud allows agents to manage customer engagements across multiple channels, email, or social media platforms. The omnichannel capabilities provide your support team with ease in maintaining customer focus.  

Service Cloud allows teams at professional services firms to add different channels to the resources of your contact center, following customers by easily switching between different platforms. Support agents and managers can easily have a consolidated view of customers on different channels over a single screen. This gives them the ease of managing customers and efficiently connecting to them through chat, voice, email, or social media.  

3. Improvement using Customer Feedback

Your agents need to know how their customers feel about their service regarding their case handling. The best way to know this is to get customer feedback right after the case is handled, so their service remains fresh in customers’ minds. 

Service Cloud allows agents to create surveys to acquire customer feedback and learn about their satisfaction with the case handling. You can set triggers for events on which the feedback survey would be sent to the customer. With Salesforce for professional services firms, such surveys can be sent to customers just with a single click. 

4. Organizational Knowledge Management

Different professional services firms tend to have a lot of insight and expertise after handling numerous cases over the years. Salesforce Service Cloud enables your agents and customers to access the knowledge assets of your organization when needed for some case or query. 

Agents can use this knowledge to take references from previous cases and provide a suitable solution to customers. For customers, these knowledge articles could be helpful for self-service, going through which they can resolve small issues on their own.  

Empower Support Agents with Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud can be a great source of transformation for professional services firms. After providing the relevant services, support agents frequently get customer queries, which can be tricky to handle. That’s where Service Cloud can be of great help to agents.

Implementing Service Cloud can bring a lot of ease for support agents. All you need is a trusted Salesforce implementation team to help you acquire all benefits. Contact us and find out all functionalities that your business can access with Service Cloud. 

For any contact center, the key to enhanced efficiency is customer service automation. But not every company is able to achieve that automation successfully. The need is to work more to enhance your customer service process, even after automating it.

According to one of the research reports from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 70% of digital transformation efforts are not so well implemented. There’s a lot that needs to be done to make sure the customer service team is making the most of digitization.

What To Do After Automating Your Customer Service Process

You might have already automated the process using Service Cloud features, but how do you know if your automation is working well for your operations? And if it’s not going right, what can you do about it?

Here are a few steps that can help you to ensure that your customer service process automation is up and running for success:

1. Test the Automated Workflow

Before you launch the workflow company-wide, check if your automation is working the way it was planned and if it will work for people who are going to use it. You need to conduct testing for the workflow. 

Make sure the testing process includes some people who are typical contributors to the service process. 

For example, if your automated workflow has some processes related to middle- and back-office employees along with customer service agents, then you should include these users too for the testing process. 

2. Make the Automation Process Available to All

If you achieve positive process improvements from the test, make sure that the workflow automation is available to all who would be using it. The respective users actually need to use the workflow at scale to acquire its full benefits.

It is important that the users know about workflow automation and that they understand how they should work with it. 

For internal users, you can spread the word through learning lunches, training sessions, or some other communications channels. For external users like customers and partners, make sure they know where to find and access links, which could be a website or self-service portal, that could take them to the automated process.

3. Measure the Results of Automated Workflow

Once the automated workflow is up and running at scale, gather as many metrics as you can to know how the automated workflow is performing. 

One important metric that you should consider is the average time the automated customer service process takes to complete. You should also look for the impacts of the automated process on your issue resolution time, customer service response time, costs, and customer satisfaction scores. 

Next, consider looking at usage stats. Discover the percentage of your process stakeholders who are actively engaging with the automated workflow? Also, consider measuring the number of times the automated workflow is engaged on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Are there any errors with the process? 

4. Conduct the Data Evaluation

Now you need to compare your automation metrics against the original metrics due to which you selected your customer service process for automation. 

For example, if your goal was to achieve an improvement in the cycle time of your returns process, you need to compare this metric before and after the respective process automation. Check if the cycle time has improved and by how much. If there is not a lot of improvement, you’ll need to identify the issue. 

Upgrade your Customer Service Process with Experts

Always remember that you should keep the customer experience front and center. Whether your initial goals were to free agents for cross-selling or to boost the process cycle time, in the end, it should all come back to the customer. 

All the points we’ve mentioned above would help you set up your automated customer service process and ensure its success. And if you need help, you can always hire a Service Cloud developer who could offer you the best assistance with the implementation. 

This is 2022 and in this age only one north star matters for retailers: bringing offline and online shopping together to eliminate friction across the journey. This is something that will be great from the view of customer experience. Well, this is one of some retail trends that you need to follow this year. 

To improve customer experience and seize the opportunity, retailers have to focus primarily on the following points:

  • Increase analytical and digital competencies to compete with companies dealing with consumer goods and selling directly to customers. 
  • Deliver excellent shopping experience to customers through different channels
  • Deliver personalized shopping experience to customers

So, considering these points, there are some retail trends that make sense to be followed this year so retailers can get a lead in the market. 

Top Retail Trends for 2022

Every retailer these days looks for ways that could get him ahead in the market and bring customer attention to their products. That’s where these retail trends would help them.

1. Reimagine Loyalty Programs

Customers these days are smart and always expect brands to understand their unique needs. That’s where retailers can use the AI capabilities like Einstein Analytics by Salesforce to understand customers and reimagine their existing loyalty programs.

They need to set up their loyalty programs in a way that could engage shoppers in a personalized and meaningful way. 

2. Unify Commerce Across Platforms

Retailers need to always stay on brand, irrespective of where their customers shop from. That’s where they need the right technology to connect their store and digital interaction that could help them to achieve a frictionless customer journey. 

In this aspect, retailers have to focus on two points:

  • They have to build commerce capabilities into messaging apps and social media platforms where customers can discover and buy their products. 
  • Almost  60% of digital orders are influenced by the store in some way or the other. Thus, it is important to scale operations to enable store fulfillment and maintain endless aisles. 

3. Humanize Experiences

For all customers, customer service matters the most. In fact, 91% of customers say that they are likely to make another purchase if the customer service of a brand is good.

That’s where retailers can think of working with some of the following methods that would help them to humanize experiences.

  • Virtual agents: Retails can connect their systems so the service agents can have a complete view of customer interactions, enabling them to provide virtual service from anywhere.
  • Chatbots: Many customers prefer using chatbots to get answers to their simple questions, instead of having a detailed conversation with an agent. 
  • Automated service: Retailers can also access automated service features to accommodate personal preferences. It would streamline journeys like creating a return order or checking delivery status. 

Follow These Retail Trends for Growth and Sustainability 

All the retail trends that we’ve mentioned are highly fruitful for this golden age of shopping. With companies mastering innovation, moving to these trends by leveraging technologies like Salesforce can help your business can the right turn towards growth. 

Leveraging Salesforce for retail with the help of certified Salesforce consultants is the best move to start when you want to acquire the potential of all the above-mentioned retail trends. 

Service teams always work to meet customer expectations fast and flexibly, and they use digital customer service channels to do so. 

When there is an unprecedented increase in customer queries, digitally managed customer service channels can help the team to manage it all. The team can also use FAQ pages, chatbots, mobile, and web chat to reduce call volumes, enabling self-service.

Customer support has now become all-digital, available for customers all the time. According to the Salesforce State of Service report, channels like messenger apps, online chat, and video support have witnessed a double-digit adoption gain in 2020 from 2018.

Top Digital Customer Service Channels You Should Know

Customers nowadays have become smart and have increased their use of digital channels to connect with a brand. Because of this shift in customer service engagement, organizations have to rethink their channel mix, or they might risk falling behind.

Here are some of the top digital customer service channels that you can consider for your business.

1. Engage on Mobile to Keep the Conversation Going

Mobile devices have become the asynchronous service option that keeps the conversation with the customers going. Mobile help to record past interactions and streamlines conversation,  thus making it a convenient option for customer service. 

Agents also use mobile to deliver personalized customer experiences. It allows agents to work with multiple customers at one time, enabling them to refer back to past interactions on mobile options. 

You can also automate routine customer requests using chatbots on SMS, WhatsApp, and other messengers.

2. Social Customer Service to Nip Potential Problems

You can connect your service and marketing with social customer service channels that would give you a complete view of the customer data. This will help agents with the consultation before they have to respond to any customer request. 

Social channels help with quick case resolution. As soon as a customer replies to a post with a complaint or issue, your team would get aware of it and could immediately work to resolve that case. 

3. Enable Self-Service Channels for Quick Questions

Many service professionals have found that customers are increasing their use of self-service. Self-service channels can include your, FAQ page, help center, knowledge base, and customer portals. 

Such portals allow customers to log in and access their information like purchase history. It is important that you keep your self-service channels up-to-date. You must regularly review your case information. What are customers ask routinely? Are you aware of any new trends? Track all these insights to create content that can help address common customer requests. 

4. Chatbots for Personalized Digital Support

You can consider a chatbot as the extension of your self-service. It helps you to analyze data with artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly resolve common issues. Many customers these days prefer using chatbots to ask simple questions, like checking their order status. 

Service agents can use chatbots to offer a personal touch to digital customer service channels. You can use natural language for programming them. 

5. Use Voice Capabilities to Deliver Connected Service

Voice holds among the most-used channels by businesses. You can consider combining your CRM with CTI using Service Cloud Voice to make voice a digital channel for your business. 

This technology puts all customer and calls information on the agent’s screen. It also transcribes the interaction carried out with customers so that agents don’t have to scribble notes. 

6. Video for Face-to-Face Interaction

One-on-one support for routine requests these days has been simplified with Visual Remote Assistant. It can allow agents to handle anything from how to reset a home TV to a system reboot.

Being easy to use, this channel is very much preferred by customers. It enables remote assistance without having to go to service centers.

Leverage All Customer Service Channels for Better Service Delivery

While you use all the above-mentioned customer service channels, regularly review your data to ensure your teams always meet expectations and deliver fast and quality service. Also, which channel you choose depends entirely on your business; what works well for a retailer may not work for a manufacturer. 

And if you need help to know what works for you, get in touch with our certified Salesforce professionals.

We are living in a time when customer experience matters the most for a business. A disappointed customer will take no longer a minute to drop a brand and look for the next one. This makes it crucial for agents to improve service to reduce customer churn. And this could be resolved with Service Cloud features that could help support agents to increase productivity and case resolution. 

Every business wants its customer service agents to resolve cases quickly and for that, they need all the data at their fingertips. Salesforce Service Cloud allows support teams to collaborate on a single platform to maintain customer records.

Having centralized data helps agents to continue conversations with customers from where it was left off. There are many such features that make Service Cloud revolutionary for support agents.

Service Cloud Features to Boost Support Agents Productivity

It doesn’t have to be a daunting task to deliver great customer service. The service agents just need to know the right technology and capabilities to deliver a winning support strategy. We’ve shared with you some of our favorite Service Cloud features that could change the way your support agents have been working and will help to boost their productivity and efficiency.

1. Extended Flow Automation

Process automation is the key to boosting case resolution and Salesforce Flow makes it possible. Service agents can now access Flow to incorporate a deeper level of process automation, making it easier to connect processes over different service channels. 

Different features that you could access with Salesforce Flow are:

  • Triage cases intelligently over different channels
  • You can apply complex routing requirements. It can include queue-based, skill-based, and direct-to-agent routing. 
  • You can even set auto-respond for customers that will direct them to helpful articles to drive self-service and enable faster resolution. 

2. Text, Voice, and Video Capabilities

Customer service has now gone way beyond telephonic calls. Now support agents can reach out to the customer using the most convenient channel for them. Here are some of the capabilities of Service Cloud that you can access:

  • In-app and web messaging: Agents can chat with customers over SMS, WhatsApp, website, or in-app, picking up the conversation where it was last left off. 
  • Einstein Conversation Mining: It utilizes Natural Language Processes to recognize the common interaction types with a particular customer and give recommendations on how you can optimize the process. 
  • Virtual Remote Assistant: Service Cloud even allows you to conduct two-way audio and video conversations between agents and customers, helping to deliver personalized experiences and create stronger relationships. 

3. Customer Service Incident Management

This feature of Service Cloud helps to connect multiple service cases on the same issue automatically. It helps teams to classify cases and prioritize them right to identify which cases to resolve first on the basis of urgency and impact. It also allows you to quickly take action and even notify customers with the status updates related to the case. 

Empower Your Agents with Salesforce Service Cloud Features

Salesforce Service Cloud is the most reliable way to empower your agents to find the answers to customers’ queries quickly, without having to escalate cases and causing delays. Bring all customer information together in one console and manage cases efficiently. 

Get the power to boost case resolution with Salesforce. Get in touch with our certified Salesforce professionals to access features to boost the efficiency of your support agents. 

It’s true that customers might lose trust and confidence in a brand if its customer service is not up to the mark. Even it’s common that customers might switch to another brand after they face insufficient customer service. But at the end of the brands, being available at all times can be difficult too. That’s where the importance of customer self-service with Salesforce lies.

Customers waiting to get an answer from the support team can be frustrating for them at times. Customer support agents use many Service Cloud features to improve customer service but sometimes it’s not possible to attend to all customers right away. This is why it is important to give something that’s readily available to customers. Considering this, more and more businesses are looking to adopt self-service options that could keep customers from long waiting times.

Top Channels to Enable Customer Self-Service with Salesforce 

Self-service options are not just beneficial for customers, but also help businesses to manage work and save time. Among many self-service channels enabled with Salesforce, some have gained a lot of popularity. 

1. Automated Chatbot

No wonder, the chatbot has evolved to be the faster-growing self-service channel for customer support. Even though this method cannot fully eliminate the need of a human for customer service, but it is better than keeping the customer waiting. 

More and more brands are considering Salesforce integration to integrate chatbots with the idea to scale their customer service. Here are some of the major benefits of implementing a chatbot:

  • Cut down customer waiting time
  • Resolve support cases to some extent
  • Manage redirects for customer inquiries 
  • Assigns leads to suitable agents

All these benefits of chatbot can contribute to uplifting your customer experience.

2. Online Customer Communities

If you want something that would have the most potential to improve your customer service, customer community can be your pick.

Online customer communities can be a great platform for problem-solving and troubleshooting. It can even provide a portal for customers, persuading them to participate in forums to look for immediate resolutions to their issues. 

3. Knowledge Base

Many companies use centralized web-based databases to collect and store information. This information can be searched by customers and even employees when looking for answers to certain questions.

Companies can use a knowledge base that can be both human and machine-readable. Customers can easily self-direct troubleshooting using human-readable knowledge bases. The content in such knowledge bases includes:

  • FAQ pages
  • User manuals
  • Forums/ peer-driven questions

On the other hand, the machine-readable knowledge bases tend to have information for automated systems and machine learning. 

Implement Customer Self-Service with Salesforce with Experts

 Customer churn because of insufficient customer service can be a nightmare for any business. Enabling customer self-service with Salesforce using the right channels can avoid such situations, giving your customers the brand experience they seek. That’s how you can cut down your customer waiting time, giving them quick resolution to their issues.

Learn more about how you can enhance your customer service efforts with Salesforce. Contact us and get along with our Salesforce professionals to uncover more ways to improve your brand reputation and increase customer loyalty. 

Salesforce scaled up its Service Cloud capabilities with its next-generation version that brings out all the new features that will improve the productivity of support agents. The customer support agents work on the frontline of your business, and it counts how efficiently they work, and this is something new Service Cloud features will improve.  

From automation to video and voice capabilities to self-service capabilities, Service Cloud has now got everything that could improve the efficiency of support agents, while ensuring to deliver excellent service.

New Service Cloud Features to Improve Customer Support

Your customer support agents are the front face of your business. They are the ones who’ll be interacting with your customers and present an image of the business. That’s why Salesforce is taking every measure to uplift the working mechanism of support agents. Check out these new features of Service Cloud that will change the way your support agents have been working.

1. Customer Service Incident Management

With this feature, the support agents can automatically connect different cases according to the similarity of incidents and issues. It will allow teams to classify and prioritize cases on urgency and impact and speed up case resolution. 

2. Virtual Remote Assistant

Customer service agents can now benefit from two-way audio and video with customers that can create personalized experiences and stronger relationships. The feature will improve consultations processes for everyone, whether it is in the financial industry, mechanics, or doctors. 

3. Workforce Engagement Intraday Management

This feature centers on closing the gap between the actual staffing needs and the forecasted work. The feature will allow companies to adjust employee schedules when things don’t go according to plan, thus maintaining customer experience while keeping the agent morale up. Such a feature will play a great role in issues like call volume spikes or severe weather incidents.

4. Einstein Conversation Mining

Salesforce has brought new voice, video, and text capabilities, and Einstein Conversation Mining is one of them. The feature uses Natural Language Processes and helps to evaluate the general interactions with customers, recommending how support agents can optimize their processes. This provides agents with guidance on where they need to work more on the knowledge base and self-service channels. 

5. Extended Flow Automation

Support teams can now enjoy a deeper level of automation, so admins can easily connect across external systems and service channels. Here’s everything new in extended flow automation:

  • Ease to apply complex routing requirements like queue-based, skill-based, and direct-to-agent routing
  • Handle omnichannel triage cases intelligently
  • Auto-response features to assist customers quickly through self-service mediums like helpful articles.  

All these features would help support agents to speed up their productivity while managing less work manually. 

6. Messaging for Web & In-app

These new messaging features allow customers to communicate over WhatsApp, SMS, or the website, picking up the conversation from where it was last left off. 

Implement and Benefit from these New Service Cloud Features

Your customer support team is the bridge between your business and your customers. Thus, you always need to make sure your support agents are delivering excellence in their work and productivity. With all these new Service Cloud features, you can empower your agents with new capabilities that will simplify their work and increase work efficiency. 

You can contact us to know more about Service Cloud and how it could help your internal departments.

You might not know but the time taken by your customer service team to answer a call or the number of calls answered on an hourly basis are not always the most accurate metrics to analyze the performance of your customer support. It is not just about the numbers and complex equations on balance sheets. It is more about how much you have achieved customer satisfaction. That’s where it means a lot to deliver high-touch service when it comes to customer support.

Customers are happiest when they don’t have to wait for a longer period to get their issues resolved by the team. Thus, to speed up the service, companies are coming up with methods like tutorials, self-help services, FAQ pages, newsletters, and making calls proactively. But there’s a lot more when you want to deliver high-touch customer service. 

What is High-Touch Service?

As technology advances, customer support centers tend to adopt modern ways to resolve customer issues to enhance their performance and results. Although companies are providing features like self-help features and chatbots to handle customer service, human intervention is important when it is about connecting with people in a personalized way.

Companies are leveraging Salesforce CRM to make sure their customer service remains top-notch and they can analyze customer behavior to deal with them in a personalized way. All in all customer service is about connecting with customers through multiple streamlined touchpoints, giving them a unique and memorable experience. 

How to Create a High-Touch Service Experience?

Now you know what exactly high-touch customer service is, but the next question is how you will achieve that. Here we have listed some ways through which your customer service team can work on delivering high-touch service.

1. Try to Understand Customer Issues

To cater to the needs of the customers, you should have an understanding of what their goals are. Try to have a detailed conversation and let the client explain what he is facing issue with and how he expects the support and service to be. 

To deliver the best you need to know first what exactly you require to deliver. Show empathy towards customers and make them feel that you really care about them and are trying your best to resolve their issues.

2. Add a personal touch

Personalized communication is one of the most effective ways to deliver interactive customer service. Salesforce helps you by providing a centralized view of all customer details and previous communication histories so you know everything about them before interacting with them.

You can use personalization in your emails too, showing that you treat each customer individually and in a unique way. You need to cross the bounds of business-like interaction to efficiently connect with customers and deliver to achieve customer retention and satisfaction.

3. Commit to All-Time Human Assistance

This is another key to deliver high-touch customer service. Chatbots, FAQs, and tutorials are all fine, but when a customer is actually in some problem, the first preference would be to talk with someone from the team who can give a closer look at the issue. You have to deliver 24×7 customer service with live chat agents to offer instant query resolution to customers.

Since customers are paying for a service or product, they will always appreciate any effort you put in to make the customers feel satisfied. This may even lead to more business with word-of-mouth marketing by customers.

4. Follow Up

Once you have achieved what you wanted, don’t just consider it an end. Keep in touch with your customers regarding project delivery through follow-ups. Small things can have a big impact. So find a few ways to make people feel special like sending personalized messages.

Even if you have resolved the issue, don’t consider the work done. Make sure you stay connected with customers through follow-ups. These little talks can have a big impact on your business. You need to look for ways to stay in touch with your customers, whether it is through follow-up calls or personalized messages.

Deliver High-Touch Service for Utmost Customer Satisfaction

It’s not just about talking with customers, it’s about being empathetic with them, listen to their issues, and resolve them in the minimum possible time. You have to make sure that they don’t promise too much and deliver too little, which will simply lead to a bad impression and might lose you a lead. Implementing Salesforce CRM can simplify managing customer data and relationships to deliver high-touch service. 

Leverage Salesforce to deliver top-notch customer service. Contact us to know how Salesforce can enhance the quality and performance of your customer service team.