As we face our 1 year anniversary of working from home, it is clear to see that providing great digital customer experiences is now critical.
A recent survey by PWC found that “1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.”
People are more accustomed to buying all sorts of products online. They are also more sophisticated with the channels they wish to communicate on. With this in mind, it’s imperative that companies offer first-class customer support across a range of devices and channels.
“an overwhelming 90% of customers report having a poor experience when seeking customer support on mobile devices.”
So, how do companies handle large volumes of support tickets or communicate with customers on different channels? The simple answer...Salesforce Service Cloud.
So What is Service Cloud?
Service Cloud is a solution offered by Salesforce for customer support. Service Cloud was created to efficiently organise and deal with processes within your customer support department.
Using its customer service console and suite of intelligent productivity tools, Service Cloud is a leading platform for all things support.
Contact centres are coming under significant pressure as online activity increases and high-volumes of customer inquiries become normality. Businesses might be considering Service Cloud for a number of reasons from releasing new products, launching new channels (Like SMS, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp etc), to dealing with emergencies and seasonal spikes or simply a growing customer base.
AI can also be a huge part of Service Cloud. Automating repetitive inquiries and helping service agents to resolve cases faster, frees up time for the agent to work on more complex tasks. Since being announced in 2016, Einstein has grown and matured on the Service Cloud platform. With Einstein Bots, you can use Chatbots to take action like checking claims status or modifying orders using natural language processing on real-time channels like SMS, chat, and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Einstein also provides case routing functionality and offers up real insights on Next Best Actions for agents to take.
In this post, we’ll discuss why Salesforce Service Cloud may be a good fit for your company and give you 3 use cases for Service Cloud, with real case examples.
Service Cloud vs Sales Cloud
When it comes to Service Cloud, it’s important to note the differences between it and Sales Cloud, as well as Community Cloud (listed below). While Sales Cloud is used to track connections between sales reps and customers/prospects, it is aimed to help agents close more deals. The aim of Service Cloud is to automate service processes, streamline workflows, and surface key articles, topics, and experts to transform the agent and customer experience.
What is great is that with Customer 360, both these clouds are integrated and support reps will be able to see the customer’s sales history, products or services bought, sales notes, concerns and any roadblocks a customer has had on their journey. Likewise, when sales reps are upselling, they will see any support cases and issues the customer may have had. This will allow them to sell more accurately.
While Sales Cloud and Service Cloud go hand-in-hand, it is not required to get both. Of course, it is best to talk to an experienced Salesforce Partner to discuss your needs.
Service Cloud vs Community Cloud
When we look at Community Cloud, it is not uncommon for users to think it is similar to Service Cloud. This is not the case.
While Community Cloud (which has a range of different features like “knowledge hubs”, etc) is aimed to create a host of interactive user-friendly experiences for your clients, Service Cloud is the back-end side of customer support. Like with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Communities go hand in hand. So while Communities is a front-end for your customers, partners and prospects, Service Cloud is the back-end and is there to assist your agents and service department. A lot of Salesforce users will integrate the two to support their service department.
Use Cases
Use Case 1 - Case Management
Customer care/ support tickets & Increase in Inquiry volumes.
The most common use case for Service Cloud is, of course, case management. While there are many things Service Cloud can do, the main aim is to manage customer queries in your support department.
Every support team, contact centre and IT department faces their own challenges daily. That is why there are Salesforce Partners here to advise and guide you through the implementation process and beyond.
When businesses release a new product or see exponential growth, they can often see an influx in inquiries. Case management can be difficult and overwhelming, not to mention draining on a support team not fully equipped to handle larger volumes. The solution is not always to hire more staff.
Bringing in Service Cloud can help employees resolve cases faster. Utilising the power of automation, Einstein, and knowledge articles, Service agents can get to the route of the issues quickly and reduce their caseloads faster than ever before.
There are a number of ways case management can be approached and is dependent on the requirements of the customer. From automation to field service, each support team can face different challenges.
One support activity that has become popular in the 12-18 months is Self-Service functionality. Self-Service can greatly reduce tickets being raised and allows users to get answers when they want. As we said above, by interacting Service Cloud with Communities this is now possible to defer inquiries and allow service agents to work on more pressing matters.
Case Study - CoreHR
Core HR needed assistance in supporting their customers efficiently. With large caseloads and not enough time & resources to respond to every inquiry in a timely manner, they wanted a solution to help streamline their processes. The main focus was case deflection and case management. They not only needed to handle caseloads more efficiently but to drive down inquiries. A self-service solution to empower customers to find answers themselves was important.
Their main request was that users would need to step through articles and notifications before being able to raise cases. This would allow service agents to maximise their time by concentrating on more pressing tasks, as well as help handle caseloads.
They needed a multi-cloud solution. Community Cloud for the front-end and Service Cloud for the back-end.
The Solution & Result: CoreHR required a seamless digital experience for their customers that matched the look and feel of their company’s branding. Utilising the power of Service Cloud and Community Cloud, Merkle delivered a cost-effective, self-service community with an overall reduction on caseloads for their contact centres. For high-priority tickets, these could be fast-tracked to the relevant service agents, speeding up the entire process.
Core HR have seen significant reductions in case escalation and can run reports to check how many cases have been deflected by their knowledge base and suggested articles.
Use Case 2 - Omnichannel Support & Automation
With the impact of Covid-19, it has never been more important for companies to be able to support customers across a number of digital channels. Customers, prospects and partners want to be able to contact you whenever and wherever they are. They expect you to be online - whether in-person or a chatbot - and to reply promptly. This is why Omnichannel & Einstein AI are vital in your service strategy.
The key aspect of creating good customer service is being able to respond and deal with these queries all from one place. Luckily, Service cloud has the ability to integrate with many different social platforms and systems. Meaning you can view and respond to customer queries from across multi-channels in one place.
An estimated 67% of consumers now use social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to seek resolution for issues [Salesforce].
So what about Einstein and automation? Automation is a big part of helping speed up Customer service & inquiries. Below we have listed some of the activities Einstein can help support centres with through automation, smart thinking and machine learning.
Activities Einstein can help you automate
Einstein can automatically recommend articles to help agents find answers quicker
Utilising Einstein Case Classification and Case Routing, inquiries can get to the right service agent faster and more efficiently.
Einstein’s Next Best Action functionality guides service agents in what to do next rather than just referring to a playbook.
Using Service Analytics to establish areas for improvement
Developers can custom build applications to streamline processes utilising the AI of Einstein production builder and Einstein Vision.
Intelligent recommendations using machine learning is the way forward for service.
Case Study - Ulster Bank
The main challenge Ulster Bank was facing was to improve customer satisfaction scores. They wanted a better understanding of where they were performing well based on customer feedback.
They were previously sending surveys via emails and phone calls. This had a low response rate of 15-25% . They were keen to improve this and engaged Merkle to implement an SMS gateway within their Salesforce platform
The Solution & Result: Merkle were able to collaborate and design a solution that would automatically generate and send an SMS survey on major transactions like loan approvals or account openings. They were able to automatically direct customer responses to their account records. This helped immensely when trying to understand CSAT scores and audit how teams were performing.
Ulster Bank saw an increase in their customer survey response rates by 60% and was able to quickly identify key areas for improvement from data.
Use Case 3 - Field Service - Remote Workers
Specifically designed for businesses who have a mobile workforce/field agents/contractors, Field Service Lightning (FSL) has been a part of Service Cloud since 2016.
FSL empowers service personnel through improved communication and increased efficiencies, as well as provides mobile support for on-the-go employees. FSL works on a unified platform where employees and customers can easily interact on their own terms. With FSL, field workers can provide faster and smarter on-site service. Not only will your customers be impressed, but they will also be delighted with your efficiency levels.
Some key features of FSL include:
Scheduling and Route Options & Optimiser
Field Service Lightning gives the ability to create routes and schedules that follow a set of rules and parameters, optimise productivity levels and have a comprehensive overview of schedules and appointments.
Customer Service
Capturing customer signatures with the mobile app allowing reps to easily return reports with only a few clicks of a button not only improves your business efficiency with accuracy and speed but allows your customers to rely on you for being fast and efficient.
Case Study - Ornua
Ornua’s main challenge was they needed an off-line mobile solution to enable their Field Service team to manage over 4, 000 visits to supermarkets across Germany more efficiently and productively.
It was very important for them to be able to manage the schedule and frequency of store visits while optimising the daily amount of store visits completed.
They also needed some additional features like recording odometer readings to track mileage, specific access to Dashboards & Reports depending on user permissions and roles and marketing activities.
The Solution & Result: Working closely with Ornua, Merkle helped define policies and work rules within the solution.
Auto-generating schedules and appointments based on the needs and locations are now possible by utilising the Scheduler & Route Optimiser. The ability to set up questionnaires to be used as customer surveys was also made possible with Salesforce Standard Surveys.
Ornua have seen huge improvements within their Field Service team as a result of this solution. Some of these improvements include a 50%+increase in daily store visits, an increase in sales and no loss of data (Previous issue).
Employee Satisfaction & Incentivising Support Agents
When it comes to onboarding and retaining service agents, it is not unknown that service can have a high turnover rate. Not only can a high turnover have recruitment and retention costs but can also be responsible for loss in capacity and productivity as new agents are being onboarded and trained. We want service agents to be motivated, engaged and ultimately stay on board.
Gamification
By utilising the power of gamification and productivity we can enable agents to not only feel engaged but empowered by working on prioritised inquiries. This of course ultimately leads to better customer service. Gamification is the most cost-effective way to incentivise service agents.
Feedback Management
Feedback is important from employees as well as customers. Checking in to see where employees are at different stages and levels is vital to your every growing business.
