How To Ensure Your Customer Support Is On Point With Salesforce Service Cloud

Customer support and service are important pillars of every organization’s functions and operations. Good customer support and service form the basis of continued sales and marketing of the organization’s products. The customer service team works in the background, but it coordinates with different on-site and off-site teams to improve the services and user experience extended by the organization. Highly specialized and targeted customer service with participative customer feedback enhances the company’s profits and retains customers in the user base.

The customer service team of a company is supported by different technical solutions like Salesforce service cloud service and its multiple features. A company needs to review the work of its customer support team and how its services can be enhanced from time to time. When it comes to an organization’s customer base, professionals need to understand that the base is fluid and is made of individuals. The customer support practices have to be altered and improved according to the mindset and needs of the customers.

Here are some of the best practices an organization can adopt with the help of Salesforce service cloud features.

One thing that needs to be understood is that the size of a customer support team need not always be large. There are multiple organizational scales, and many organizations have small customer support teams with very few members. The key is to use scalable customer support solutions like salesforce service cloud features to help a customer support team of any size and capability.

The Salesforce Service Cloud Suite’s versatility helps create excellent customer support teams technically adept and good in their work. While a large team of customer support executives is great support for high response time and rate, a small customer support team helps to know your customers deeper. Every organization has to evaluate its resources and needs before choosing the size of the team and the executives on it.

Also read: Deliver Exceptional Customer Experience With 5 Must Have Service Cloud Enhancements

The response time for every customer query is a measurement metric for the efficacy of customer support services. Customers do not like long waiting times, and they want companies to be present and participative in the resolution process. They want to actively connect with an interactive brand and listen to their queries and issues.

Therefore, the average waiting time to respond to a customer’s query or complaint should be as low as possible. The ART has shrunk to 5 minutes or less with advanced communication and assistive technology. An ART of 5 minutes or less is an excellent response time. With high data speeds and AI, brands can talk faster with the customer.

Moreover, a customer’s attention span is very, and it goes down when he is waiting for a complaint or a query. A low ART will create a positive image of the company in the customer’s mind and keep the customer happy. A low ART gives the customer an idea that the company cares about the customers and increases customer loyalty to the brand.

Most brands have an average response time of around 12 to 15 hours, a moderate level response. However, this ART can be improved using Salesforce Service Cloud service. The advice of a salesforce service cloud consultant can be used to improve the ART by real-time monitoring of customer queries.

The use of AI-enabled chatbots and the prioritization of queries by customer support executives help improve the ART and its effect on the customer base. While average response times should be around half a day or a day, some companies take more than a few days to answer the queries and complaints of customers. These companies need the clever use of Salesforce Service Cloud functions and features.

Functional customer communication channels are a must if there is consistent communication with the users. A brand should not rely on a single communication channel as there might be an overload of requests and customer traffic. Moreover, not every customer will be comfortable with communicating on that single channel. Therefore, the company should extend new, innovative communication channels to the customers. When the organization provides different options for communication, the customer can communicate in an easier and faster way with the brand.

Moreover, multiple communication channels manage customer traffic well. These days, customers can create a single dashboard of customer communication through the integration of Salesforce CRM over social media accounts. Moreover, emails can be a trustworthy and classic way of communicating with clients every day.

Integrating help chatbots and forms with websites or social media accounts can greatly help the organization. The creation of multiple channels for communication also helps in the faster gathering of customer feedback from the user base. A smart way of managing communication portals is to offer questions as suggestions so that the customer knows what to ask when chatting with the customer support team.

Also read: How To Leverage Salesforce Effectively To Fuel Your Financial Services

To create a better impact, the company has to analyze and improve its communication and message. The communication has to be clear and direct to avoid misunderstandings. Clear and direct communication with customers improves the overall lead conversion process and impact. The process and end message must be highly simplified and streamlined for immediate impact. After analysis of customer feedback and behavior, this streamlining can be done to identify the lacking areas in the message.

The company’s customer service team has a huge responsibility on its shoulders as it is an extensive projection of the brand image. Therefore the customer support team must maintain the consistency and accuracy of communication with every customer for a clear and effective brand image. The communication from your staff side should be concurrent with what your brand projects as values. The overall communication falls flat without consistency and accuracy, and the brand image is shaky.

In such a situation, the customer base fails to connect with the brand for a long time. Apart from tweaking the communication strategy, the brand also has to tweak the training strategy so that the communicated information to customers is accurate and concurrent across all communication portals. The training material and information communicated to the executives have to be well researched and reviewed. The customer support executives have to be trained from time to time.

The communication with customers has to be clear cut and very effective. For this, the presentation and grammar of the communication have to be accurate irrespective of the medium. The grammar of the communication can change the real meaning and message behind it. Therefore, hiring well-trained and skilled customer support executives is very important.

Customer support executives must be trained in presentation skills, people management, and interaction skills. Salesforce Service Cloud helps train and improve these skills in the workforce, and it also helps in better presentation through different tools and features. The service cloud also offers suggestions to improve chat lingo through analysis and feedback.

Another way of supporting better presentation and accuracy is to include automated messages in response to support requests. These automated messages generated by the CRM platform reduce customer support executives’ burden and improve the grammar and presentation of the entire conversation. On the other hand, the customer support executive should follow up after resolution to ensure the customer is satisfied and gives good feedback.

Follow-up cycles help you establish a deeper relationship with your customer. The customer support executive should be able to answer most questions during the first interaction so that there is a rapid resolution of the issue raised. The customer service team must focus on creating quality without quantity when communicating. Many tools on the Salesforce Service Cloud help improve customer communication on all fronts.

Just because there are numerous online portals to strengthen customer service does not mean you should ignore the offline part as a company. The company can use specific Salesforce Service Cloud tools offline for field team management and better offline interactions between the executives and the customers.

Ensure that the customer service is fast and detailed so that first impressions are great. Offline interactions are a lot more important because these are direct interactions without an online medium. However, enhancing online interaction quality also rests on the customer support team. This will create high brand recall and customer loyalty in the user base, leading to more revenue and returns.

These points are how being a salesforce service cloud service partner will help your company in customer expectation management. The tools and features extended by the Service Cloud can be used to improve customer communication across all these fronts. Using a completely effective CRM solution like Salesforce Service Cloud helps the company avoid bad customer experience and instability. With the help of the Salesforce Service Cloud suite, the company offers consistent quality customer service and support.