How Salesforce Service Cloud Maximizes Collaboration

Effortless customer service collaboration is no longer a nice-to-have. Technology has transformed the field to the point that industry leaders

3 min. read

Effortless customer service collaboration is no longer a nice-to-have. Technology has transformed the field to the point that industry leaders now offer seamless, integrated, multi-channel customer support experiences. And studies show that most consumers now demand this sort of high-class support from every company:

  • 75% of consumers expect a consistent experience, no matter which channel they engage from.
  • 89% of customers experience frustration when forced to repeat the same information to multiple service reps.

Savvy consumers assume they can engage with your company through a variety of channels, with numerous reps, without missing a beat. So to avoid churn, the knowledge of every customer service rep needs to be shared across the entire team. Any siloed information could lead to a negative experience, lost customer or critical review.

You don’t need to spend millions of dollars developing all this technology from scratch, however. Salesforce Service Cloud is specifically designed to maximize customer service collaboration.

4 Ways Salesforce Service Cloud Boosts Collaboration

1. Integrate information no matter how customers contact you with Salesforce's multi-channel offerings.

As customers expect to engage with your company through more and more channels, that puts a strain on your service team; they need almost perfect knowledge sharing to deliver a consistent experience through every method of communication.

The good news? Service Cloud integrates with every support channel that your customers expect to use: live chat, social media, SMS, voice, email and web. These features ensure that any customer question or complaint from any channel is immediately tracked in Salesforce and tied back to the same company information. As a result, any rep can engage with any customer through any means and instantly access that customer’s entire communication history with your company.

And this can offer significant value in terms of retention. Companies with the most robust omnichannel offerings retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for other companies.

2. Get customer cases in the right hands with assignment and escalation rules.

Specialization of reps  by product, customer industry or support tier — allows them to provide quicker and higher quality service. But only if you can triage customer inquiries to the right teams.

Salesforce’s assignment and escalation rules do just that. The right assignment rules can instantly send cases to the correct team, as soon as they are submitted from any channel. Escalation rules, meanwhile, automatically route difficult customer issues to your senior support staff when extra help is needed. Together they allow you to get the most from your support staff by letting each rep focus on what he or she does best.

3. Rely on queuing and automatic routing, so cases only get assigned to active reps.

Customer service collaboration often falters when assignment processes rely on specific people; as soon as that person is out sick, cases assigned to them pile up and response times lag.

Instead, Salesforce queues allow customer cases to gather in a shared pool that a whole team can resolve together, eliminating dependence on any single person. Salesforce Omni-Channel takes this functionality one step further. It automates the queue system by assigning queued cases to individual reps, but only when those reps are active in Salesforce.

4. Place all case updates in one location with Salesforce Chatter.

Chat tools like Gchat and Slack are typically great for collaboration. But they can cause trouble for your customer service teams if critical case updates or notes get buried in long conversation threads. Email presents the same risk.

Salesforce Chatter solves this problem by allowing your reps to communicate directly on a case or customer record. What’s more, Chatter feed tracking automatically saves case updates and customer communication logs in the same case feed. These tools ensure that any rep can see the entire history of a case  every update, every call, every email  at a glance when they engage with a customer.

With all of these customer service collaboration features, your entire service team can work in harmony. Reps can pick up a case right where others left off and provide personal, relevant and helpful service.

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Danielle Sutton