Your Handbook to Optimize the Implementation of Salesforce Service Cloud

Having the Service Cloud on board the next thing the company wanted to do was understand how to incorporate in a way that would help them better understand customers’ needs and cater to them in a more effective manner than before. Let’s go over some of the key points that contributed hugely to their excellence. 

• Customer satisfaction – More intimate relations with customer were built where there is one on one support available for all customers. Communication with customers through all channels was made available for e.g. video chat or agents, instantly guiding them to solutions.  
• Mobile App – With app mobile support customers were able to interact via live agent video chat, screen sharing and on-screen guided assistance. Having such easily available apps for customers meant customers were happier than ever. 
• Analytics – All information was no gathered and evaluated through custom dashboards which made it easier for the company to analyze past transactions, current actions and take actions from the location they were at. More informed and quicker decisions were made, leading to higher profitability.
• Agent productivity is supercharged – Agents got all the resources and well, all the power they needed to become superheroes for customers. They have features like email-to-case, skills based routing and milestone tracking which helped them respond quickly and more efficiently on any customer channel. All in all, this helped lead to an increase in overall productivity and efficiency. 

A statement was given which stated “This has been a massive step forward for us, I’m amazed how quick and smooth the implementation was.”  Andrea Malende, -Business Process Expert.

This is just one of the many case stories talking about how Salesforce Service Cloud bought out an enterprise from one of their dark days to show them all things can be sorted out if you take the right approach at the right time using the right platform. 

The following case study covered some of the problems that Coca Cola was facing as a company. There are of course other dilemmas other companies may be facing apart from those mentioned. Let’s talk about some of the common and mainstream issues most enterprises are facing nowadays and how Salesforce Service Cloud can come to the rescue.

Creating a memorable impression of your business is easy with Salesforce Service Cloud. Let’s look at some advantages that will benefit your operational process in more detail.

1.Boost Agent Productivity

Using Salesforce cloud means agents will be able to work from anywhere at any time. Agent productivity has a direct bearing on customer’s satisfactions levels, the more emotionally intelligent and fast at getting back to customers the agent is, the happier customers he will make. Happier customers mean more loyal ones; more loyal customers mean higher profitability. Agents should be trained in a way that they understand customer’s issues from the word go, understand how the different resources they have around them will be used to cater to customers and finally know how to offer contextualized support.

Before understanding how an agent’s productivity can be increased it is important to understand the nature and aspect of their jobs. Turning a blind eye to some of the common challenges that hamper their productivity means you will not be able to find the right solution for them in the first place. Some of the challenges that agents face is:

• Click fatigue: Agents get tired of endless navigation that requires them clicking away for the whole day. Having to click too many times just to access records, fields and buttons to solve a customer issue can be very monotonous and boring.
• Manual copy-pasting: Agents have to repeatedly copy-paste internal notes, email signatures, and message content that they have to use in more than one place. Apart from this they have to key in the same information such as a customer’s name and case number every time they need to retrieve related data.
• Repetitive tasks: Agents are like robots, having to repeat the same tasks over and over. All time is spent on repetitive everyday chores like field updates, email responses and messages, leaving them no time to get headspace or think of new ways on how the business can grow and achieve bigger goals.

Such is the importance of having the right tools and resources at your disposal. Salesforce Service Cloud allows you to automate such repetitive processes and helps customer information be on the fingertips of agents. This amplifies agent and team output and enhances the customer experience.

That is where Service Cloud Lightning Console comes in: a solution that every agent can bank upon while working in a fast-paced customer support center environment.

Service Cloud Lightning Console 

Here are the top service console features that can simplify your agents’ life and elevate their performance and team output:

Quick Text
Quick Text feature can be used to insert predefined messages, such as greetings, short notes and answers to common questions in emails, chats, tasks etc. This way, an agent can create and share standardized messages without having to retype everything from the beginning or in fact even have to copy paste, which mind it, becomes super boring after some time.

Macros 
Running Macros means there are a set of instructions that tell the system how to complete a task with the help of using the utility bar on Service Cloud Console. Macros are run for all repetitive tasks such as updating case statuses or sending emails to customers. What’s better is that agents can get a predefined set of instructions executed on an open record with a single click.

Quick Actions 
Quick Actions can be created for the most important tasks that agents need to execute immediately. This feature helps in creating instant tasks, logging calls, creating or updating records, addressing queries, sending emails and helping in other tasks the agent needs to perform on a daily basis. It also allows predefined values to be set for each action. Let’s take the example of an agent creating an action called ‘Close Case’, they can predefine the Status field value for this action as ‘Closed’. 

Email Templates and Notifications
To make the response time faster, agents can use predefined emails, which are email templates provided in Service Cloud. These templates can be used as they are or be customized and personalized before sending. They can be inserted in macros that include instructions for email actions and inserted in quick actions that include predefined values for those email actions.

2. Streamline Omni channel Engagements

Today, customer journeys are Omni channels, involving interactions across various touch points both online and offline. Customers browse products on a company’s website, compare it with similar products on an e-commerce mobile app, check out a demo in a physical store, and finally purchase it via the company’s social media handle. Having an Omni channel service solution is critical to ensuring a seamless customer experience and smooth handoff among agents servicing the customer on online and offline channels.

Service Cloud offers agents a 360-degree customer view, capturing every interaction a customer has with the company across channels and consolidating them on a single platform for a single customer view. 

Here are some Service Cloud features that agents can use to offer their service wherever the customer is:

• Web-to-case: Create a form of case fields that customers can fill out and submit to agents from a website. You are allowed to fill up to 5000 cases per day.

• Email-to-case: Automatically creates cases from emails received from customers.

• Call Centre and Open CTI: Integrate Service Cloud with third party computer telephony integration systems. Agents are then able to view data from incoming calls, make outgoing calls and report on call outcomes.

• Self Service Help Center: Allows customers to automatically find answers. Log cases and update orders on their own from self-service portals.

• Social Customer Service: Listen to, respond to, and log cases on social media platforms.

Messaging: Connect with customers using SMS and FB messenger all through the console. Emoji’s can also be added for a personal touch.

3. Effectively Use Service Data to Uncover Insights

Insights
Service managers often contemplate critical questions like: Are my customers happy? How well trained is my team, are they prepared for any changes? Are we using the right service metrics to measure what we care about? All these are questions that need answers. And where will these answers come from? Well it’s easy, service cloud implementation will help your business find the answers. It will bring your business multiple tangible benefits by improving customer service quality and increasing the efficiency of agent’s performance and output. However, that is not it. In order to have long lasting impacts and optimized implementation it is important for service teams to use the right service metrics. Combining the right service metrics to create a service metrics strategy that aligns with the overall business goals is important.

Align Service Priorities and Business Goals
The customer support team should make a list of all their aims and goals, listed in a way where the most prioritized goals and aims are mentioned at the top. Some of these may include reducing the times agents spend on manual repetitive tasks, training new agents and improving CSAT test score. Next, business goals for the service teams have to be established. Some goals may include empathy driven support, brand loyalty, happy customers and greater customer success.

Once service teams have identified their priorities and goals, they can define the exact metrics that align with these, and measure the success of their service strategy and efforts.

Use Case Management
Basic case management should be implemented before moving on with the analysis of service metrics. Cases track customer questions and feedback and service metrics are inspired from these cases. It is important to discuss with your key members the service metrics and what everyone wants to gauge from these metrics. Choosing and deciding which metrics are more important is also needed so time can be split on all accordingly. Strategic questions lead to a better sense of what is to really be measured. There are 2 types of service metrics:

Internal metrics 
These focus on what happens inside the contact center. For e.g. Employee turnover rate or absenteeism. Also, it is used to measure the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your agent’s satisfaction levels. It is important to measure both individual performance and that of the entire service team. Such performance related metrics will help you learn 2 things: what agents are doing with their time and how effectively are agents using their time.

External metrics 
These focus on what happens outside of the contact center. For e.g. Customers satisfaction and quality of relationships established with them.

It is important to keep a balance of both metrics and take them both into equal considerations when making decisions and creating a strategic plan.

4. Leverage AI to Improve Customer Service

Salesforce Service Cloud comes with an inbuilt Artificial Intelligence engine called Service Cloud Einstein. This acts as an agent’s smart assistant helping to deliver intelligent and fast service no matter how high the case volume may be. Einstein offers a unique set of tools that help agents work across the cases life cycle from the first stage, case creation to the very end, routing to resolution. Einstein can help the business in many ways including automatically reviewing, classifying and routing cases to all appropriate agents. It also guides agents with real-time recommendations based on customer interactions and relationships. Also, it offers automatic replies to routine customer questions and queries. Finally, it summarizes the cases for agents and team leaders to review and then analyze. 

Features of Einstein for Service

Einstein Bots
Bots help save time for agents by handling simpler, routine requests so that time can be freed for agents to work on more productive things and complex cases that require their complete attention. The best thing about bots is that they can be customized to handle different situations, adopt voices suited to the company and can then be monitored continually to be improved.

Einstein Classification Apps
Classification apps help agents resolve cases in a quicker, more accurate and consistent manner. Whenever a case comes in, Einstein Case Classification recommends, selects and saves field values based on case data from the past. Time is also saved when an agent completes a case and Case Wrap-up helps predict the final field value based on the closest cases and chat transcripts.

Einstein Article Recommendations
Article recommendations help agents resolve cases quicker than normal because they get recommended the most relevant knowledge articles based on similar cases in the past. All recommendations appear in the knowledge component of the Lightning Service Console.

Einstein Reply Recommendations
This feature helps agents create quick and standardized messages in a matter of no time. This comes in handy particularly when agents are handling multiple chats at one time. Rather than typing messages from scratch and composing new ones every time, agents will get recommendations which will appear in the right hand side of the Einstein Replies component.