5 Tips for Building Out the Best Customer Experience Across Channels

You want to empower your sales team and customer service agents with tools and information to help them quickly engage, personalize, and resolve questions for your customers, so you’ve purchased or are about to purchase Salesforce Service Cloud. Or maybe you’ve deployed Service Cloud with another partner or internally and haven’t yet achieved your expectations for return on investment, usability and customer experience.

THE CLOCK IS TICKING ON YOUR INVESTMENT

Help is here! We’ve put together a series of Service Cloud Implementation “Best Practice” articles, which will show you how to optimize your CRM investment and provide your end-users and customers with the best experience possible.

#3 in our series are 5 tips for building out customer engagement across multiple channels within your organization.

STRONG OMNI-CHANNEL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES LEAD TO INCREASED REVENUE

A recent Aberdeen study showed that the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel strategies.[i] Therefore, it is critical, as part of your Service Cloud implementation, that you plan to optimize cross-channel customer experiences.

Here are 5 tips to make this happen.

#1. PROVIDE CHANNELS OF CHOICE FOR YOUR CUSTOMER (PEOPLE ARE MOBILE AND BUSY)

Here are things we know:

• Most people do not want to call and wait on hold to have a sales or service question answered.
• Voice channels of communication are the most expensive to support. For service, the average cost per call is between $5-$10.
• Alternative channels such as web chat or SMS could be less than $2.00 per interaction as the agents are able to handle more conversations. And the ease of communication opens up more sales opportunities.
• Giving the customer their choice of communication channel and options for self-service dramatically improves the customer experience and decreases costs to the company.
• Messaging (Web/SMS/Facebook Messenger) are quickly becoming the channels of choice. And they offer much higher engagement on pro-active reach out for sales follow-up and/or case resolution.
• Service Cloud enables you to communicate with your customers through multiple channels such as Web Chat, Mobile Messaging, Facebook, Communities, SOS and 2-way SMS. Maybe offer messaging with Facebook Messenger or text-enable your 1-800 number to create a better mobile experience. This is all possible with Salesforce Service Cloud (using Live Agent and LiveMessage).

#2. ENSURE CONTINUITY OF SERVICE ACROSS ALL CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION

• Omni-channel capabilities are central to Service Cloud Einstein. Using a shared information hub you can provide a consistent customer experience across all communication channels and devices.
• A customer experience that is streamlined across all channels of communication also ensures that information is captured by your Salesforce CRM and used to strengthen and personalize the customer experience no matter how your customer chooses to engage.
• For Sales use cases – get them an immediate response on the right channel. For Service – offer self-service, create the case, create the entitlements to meet your SLA’s and the workflows to ensure speedy resolution. And when there needs to be face2face interactions Salesforce SOS offers real-time video conferencing.

#3. MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS

• Instead of using costly voice channels as the fall back for customers add a conversational chatbot across your digital channels to answer routine questions, direct your customers to the right person, and make your employees more efficient while providing your customer with a choice of communication channels.
• Your Salesforce empowered pro-active chatbot, powered by Natural Language Processing, can be your central communication hub ensuring that no leads are lost and making it easy for your customers to find what they need. Your bot will use your Salesforce data to personalize a conversation and be tied into your Salesforce Knowledge database further improving the customer experience.
• The bot can automate 10% or more your service cases and collect info about the customer and their service request to create cases off-hours. And when the bot can’t answer the question, it can provide a seamless transition to a human sales or service agent at any time using Salesforce Service Cloud– providing that agent with preliminary information to make resolution easier and faster (reducing the AHT).

#4. GIVE A ROBUST SELF-HELP OPTION

• Many people prefer a self-help option – certainly as the first line of communication. You can create a Salesforce community powered by Salesforce data to provide a forum for discussion, resources and self-help topics. Check out Fit Bit’s Community!
• Provide an escalation option with your Salesforce powered bot to ensure an enhanced customer experience.

#5. FOCUS ON PRIORITIZING THE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP AND SOLVING THE CUSTOMER’S PROBLEM AT EVERY TOUCHPOINT

• Once your communication channels are streamlined you will be able to maximize the customer experience and support your human sales and service agents by capturing the data they need to expedite a lead or address a service concern – without being locked into a messaging cycle. These customer conversations are captured in Salesforce, so you can analyze all of the data to drive sales/service delivery improvements and also build out a robust knowledge set to allow for increased self-service.
• Improved productivity, improved capture of sales leads, improved customer satisfaction – all at a lower cost.

By empowering customers to pick their channel of choice, providing robust self-service options, and personalizing the experience, your salespeople will be able to focus on qualified prospects and your support team on the most complex cases.

Add a chatbot, leveraging your Salesforce data across all channels, and you can further increase your engagement, customer self-service, and employee productivity.

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Need help optimizing your Service Cloud system configuration? Whether you are just starting out with Service Cloud, or want to make sure you’ve got your system set up optimally, NeuraFlash can help your organization configure a system that provides extraordinary experiences for your agents and customers. Give us a call at 1-844-638-7235, or visit our website at http://neuraflash.com.

[i] [i]“25 Amazing Omnichannel Statistics every Marketer Should Know”; January 9, 2017 v12data.com