Salesforce 101: Service Cloud and the Customer Lifecycle

If you’ve read the previous posts (here and here) in this series, you’ll be familiar with the Customer Lifecycle. If

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If you’ve read the previous posts (here and here) in this series, you’ll be familiar with the Customer Lifecycle. If you’re coming in fresh, however, here’s a quick catch-up: The Customer Lifecycle is a way of doing business that prioritizes the wants and needs of customers at every stage of the buying cycle. It looks like this:

CLC-2

As a company, we make sure our processes and technologies are always aligned with the Customer Lifecycle. And as consultants, we help other companies do the same. In both cases, we do it with Salesforce.

As I’ve written previously, I want to use these posts to outline how Salesforce’s core platforms — Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud — power each stage of the Customer Lifecycle. With marketing and sales in the books, let’s focus on service.

Service Cloud 101

As the Customer Lifecycle shows, closing a sale only marks the halfway point of the buying cycle. After that, it’s time to provide great service. Thankfully, Service Cloud makes it easy by focusing on cases.

Any time a customer asks a question, offers feedback or reports an issue, this triggers a case tied to their contact information. However the customer chooses to connect — email, phone, web or social media — their case will be available to view by your entire team. Depending on what the customer needs, their case can be immediately triaged to the right person.

For inquiries that require multiple touch points over a span of time, this full-team visibility is essential. Customers don’t want to explain their questions and problems again and again to new reps or via new channels, so all previous information needs to stored in one easy-to-access place.

Using Service Cloud to Power the Customer LifeCycle

Whether your company sells products or services, you want to make sure the customer is fully satisfied with their purchase. That obviously means you’ll need to continue providing support past the point of sale. Service Cloud empowers your agents to do so in a customer-centric way.

Think of different customer service experiences that you’ve had. Extended response times, uninformed agents and limited communication channels probably haven’t endeared you to what otherwise might be fine companies. Quite fairly, you expect more.

By choosing a technology that allows you to serve your customers how they want to be served, you’re clearly conveying how much you value them. And when customers know that they’re valued, they’re more likely to become brand loyalists and repeat customers.

Keeping Customers Priority

To truly succeed, your business needs to prioritize the customer at every stage of the buying cycle. To do this at scale, you’ll need a technology platform that centralizes information from a number of different channels, reduces the time it takes to perform repetitive tasks and gives you the power to deliver personalized experiences.

Together, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud do exactly that. As a trio, they form a powerful engine.

In this series of posts, we’ve just covered the basics of how Salesforce’s core platforms power the Customer Lifecycle. If you want go deeper, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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Danielle Sutton