Chapter 1

Solving Business Challenges with Service Cloud

In This Chapter

Putting smiles on your customers' faces

Gauging the health of your business

Storing information in one place

Working smoothly with your team

Accessing data on the go

Building customer loyalty

What keeps you up at night? Your profit margins? Your lack of visibility into what affects those profit margins? Is it that your employees don't address customers as well or as quickly as you'd like them to? And is that because they don't have access to the right information? Take a moment to think about your biggest concerns for your business. Odds are, Salesforce can help!

Salesforce is simpler than most customer relationship management (CRM) tools. By keeping things simple, Salesforce enables you to spend more time concentrating on your business challenges and less on troubleshooting the system. Understanding how to use and customize Salesforce, as well as properly aligning it to your business process, is the key to putting in place a powerful tool that will simplify your path to success.

In this chapter, we provide a high-level overview of native Salesforce features designed to address typical business challenges. We cover these common business problems and show you how to leverage Salesforce to ameliorate or even eliminate them.

Keeping Your Customers Happy

The customer is where everything starts. Customers are the lifeblood of any business. Without them, sales would be meaningless, service wouldn't exist, and there would be no one to market to. This concept may seem obvious, but research shows that customer service is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects in lost business. It's also one of the most influential aspects in bringing about repeat business and customer loyalty.

Customers expect excellent service. They want their issues resolved conveniently, painlessly, and as quickly as possible. One of the most effective barriers to providing excellent service is actually pretty simple to solve: In order to keep customers happy, you need to be able to readily access their information.

As a customer service representative, how much time have you wasted trying to identify a customer? Do you stumble and stall while trying to hunt for his previous support interactions? In this day and age, it's unacceptable not to have a 360-degree view of your customer (see the nearby sidebar). Without this critical ingredient, you're needlessly putting your organization at risk of losing a customer for good.

Salesforce Service Cloud helps businesses keep their customers happy by keeping their information in one central place. From one page, you can see a customer's personal information, as well as his recent interactions with your agents and the products he's purchased. Your agents have access to everything they need when they get that customer on the phone. Your customers will be pleased to have someone address their issue quickly without having to explain their backstory.

Even with the most customer-centric technology on earth, you can't truly create meaningful customer relationships without people. Your customer service representatives are vital to the success of any service organization. A holistic approach to customer service begins with your employees genuinely caring about and listening to your customers. Empathy and understanding - combined with the power of knowing who the customer is and the customer's history with your company - are gold.

Everyone on your team should be empowered to act on the deep understanding they have of your customers, as well as the desired customer experience. So, if Larry only contacts your business via email and never wants to receive phone calls, you can ensure that anyone servicing Larry will respect his wishes.

The 360-degree view

You may hear people refer to needing "a 360-degree view of the customer," but what does that mean? Generally speaking, when a customer interacts with your business, you must have a 360-degree view of the customer, or a way to draw from a rich repository of information pertaining to that customer. In other words, a 360-degree view of your customer allows you to see her personal information and, on the same page, view recent purchases, renewals, complaints, or phone conversations. This information is useful in multiple respects. Not only does it help to expedite the service process (thereby increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction), but it also saves you money, buys more time for your reps, shortens hold times, and facilitates upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

It is also worth mentioning that your customers may have customers themselves. Knowing the ultimate goals of your customer, who they sell to or provide services for, does wonders for your relationship with them, and the good news is that all this is possible with Salesforce.

With a 360-degree view, you can more effectively guide your approach to interaction with customers and service them in a much more personal and profound way. This does more than keep them happy - it creates loyalists for your brand.

Measuring the Health of Your Business

If you aren't gauging the health or progress of your business, trying to improve it won't get you far. The first step in improving your business is benchmarking: You need to know where you are before you can determine where you want to go.

Service Cloud allows you to quickly create and capture a multitude of data points that you deem most important to the success of your business. This, in turn, benefits all levels of your organization so that everyone from a first-tier support rep to the CEO can get real-time actionable information pertaining to the health of the organization. Service reps can check how many issues they've remediated this week, managers can drill into urgent escalations, and the CEO can view steady decreases in operational cost in response to her call-deflection strategy.

Service Cloud brings this all together by organizing only those data points you want to see into meaningful reports and comprehensible dashboards. Charts, graphs, and easy-to-use formulas are only the beginning of synthesizing an overwhelming volume of information into traceable and actionable data. Say goodbye to hours of grueling manual preparation in spreadsheets for those weekly meetings.

Establishing a Single Source of Truth

How many times have you had to look at different databases to find different kinds of information? You need to look up the customer in one system, log in to another system to get his address and order history, go to yet another system to enter new orders, and access yet another system that holds his warranty or service contract.

Of course, you can use all these legacy systems in conjunction with Service Cloud if you want to, but having a single source of truth solves a major business challenge for most businesses. You can quickly centralize your accounts, contacts, cases, entitlements for support, and interaction history or call logs in order to have a one-stop shop for all the information you need to effectively serve your customers.

Using Service Cloud, not only is all your customer's data updated and available, but this information is also accessible to other departments (only if you want it to be, of course, but sharing is caring). Breaking down silos in an organization is an effective tool to make sure that all sides of your business see the most up-to-date information about a customer. In this way, John in sales knows not to reach out and try to sell to the customer who just yelled at you about his broken product.

Collaborating with Your Coworkers

Collaboration is an often overlooked aspect of successful business. People are so caught up in the goings-on of their own teams and departments that they forget that any other team or department exists. Silos (independent teams with no visibility into other teams) impede productivity in organizations because they contribute to unnecessary duplicate effort and a lack of internal visibility, and they don't foster an open, collaborative work environment. Collaborating more often and more effectively with the right people in your organization can help you resolve customer support issues much more quickly.

Think about it: Doesn't that new guy always ask for historical knowledge or company policy updates that you can easily answer? Sometimes you find what he needs through email threads; other times you just exchange the information at the water cooler or at your cubicle.

Service Cloud allows you to collaborate with your team more effectively, with a feature called Chatter. Unlike email threads, Chatter consists of publicly viewable posts with news feeds that display different pieces of useful information. You can also be rewarded or reward others for collaborating, thus driving this behavior and increasing internal awareness of business issues that are most important to your company or department.

Another feature in Service Cloud that facilitates collaboration is the concept of Case Teams, which allow multiple agents to be added to a particular case so that a team can work together to service it. This is particularly useful in scenarios such as an agent taking a vacation, where the customers and cases he is responsible for aren't forgotten or left waiting.

Getting the Data You Need When...