How Salesforce Helps Companies Deliver Excellent Customer Service
It’s well-said the simplest and most effective way to build a lasting relationship with a client is to deliver excellent customer service. Good customer service enables a company to provide delightful experiences to a client, allowing it to acquire a significantly higher share of his wallet. A study by Bain reveals businesses that provide superior experiences to their clients enjoy stronger loyalty and transform the clients into promoters earning a lifetime value of 6 to 14 times higher than their competitors.
How can companies provide first-rate customer service? What does it take to build a loyal base of clients? Businesses need to use a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A powerful CRM system empowers organizations to make the best use of marketing and customer data to provide top-notch services to their clients. No wonder, over the last few years, the number of companies using CRM systems has increased significantly, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down.
One of the most widely-used CRM systems is Salesforce; a study conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that more than 20% of companies rely on the novel IT platform to serve their customers.
Salesforce comes with a plethora of useful features, and these help organizations improve their business efficiency in a big way — a report published by Salesforce reveals firms using the innovative CRM are able to reduce the time taken to make decision by approximately 38%, boost their sales revenues by almost 25% and enhance customer satisfaction levels by as much as 35%.
Today, we’ll examine how Salesforce helps companies deliver top-notch customer service, and thereby, delight them.
Get a Single, Big Picture of the Customer Across the Organization
It is often said customer service isn’t the business of one department but of the entire organization, and rightly so. Many a time, customer service representatives need to work and share information about clients with their colleagues in marketing, sales, accounting and other departments. However, several companies suffer from the inability to enable their people from multiple departments to exchange data seamlessly, and this prevents them from delivering timely services to their customers.
Salesforce helps businesses overcome this challenge with high efficacy. The CRM platform empowers organizations to come up with a unified repository of customer information, which can be accessed by personnel from various departments very easily, in real time, thereby allowing them to act without delay.
Provide Delightful Customer Service Across All Channels
The new-age customer connects with businesses using a wide variety of channels — websites, social networking platforms, e-mail, telephone calls and in-person visits. No matter how he connects, the customer expects companies to provide excellent service. This can be a daunting task, as using data collected at multiple touchpoints through a wide variety of channels in real time is fraught with difficulty.
Companies can resolve this problem using Salesforce. The CRM system allows an organization to fully utilize customer data and understand the preferences of each client and define his journey. Salesforce enables the business integrate information gathered across channels, empowering the business to deliver service of the highest quality to the customer, irrespective of when, where and how he connects with it.
Use Chatbots to Automate Customer Support Activities
For decades, companies have relied on large teams of customer service agents to answer questions of their clients and provide support. This entailed huge costs and often resulted in inconsistencies in the quality of service due to involvement of the human element. To overcome this problem, many organizations are using intelligent chatbots that have the ability to comprehend and respond to customer enquiries. A study predicted the global market for chatbots, estimated at $430.9 million in 2020, will register a staggering Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.9% from 2021 to 2028.
Organizations can use Salesforce to leverage the immense potential of customer service chatbots. The cutting-edge capabilities of Salesforce Einstein, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered product of the CRM solutions company, help provide highly relevant, instantaneous responses to queries posed by customers. The chatbots can also track, pool and analyze data gathered from each interaction, enabling organizations to identify commonly-faced challenges of their customers. This allows the businesses to program the chatbots to resolve the challenges efficaciously, freeing customer service representatives to focus on more complex issues of clients. Furthermore, Salesforce Einstein can be used to provide high-quality multilingual customer support.
Enable Customer Self-service of High Quality
Over the last few years, the number of people using customer self-service portals is increasing significantly. According to a study by Gartner, nearly 70% of customers are utilizing self-service channels to resolve their problems. However, a mere 9% only can get a proper resolution to their challenges through self-service channels. This highlights the need to enable seamless customer self-service to help clients find the right solutions to their issues.
Salesforce enables businesses to deliver customer-self service of high quality. The CRM system can be used to create a self-service portal that contains all the information sought by customers. Companies can also use Salesforce to develop web-based communities where a customer can ask and answer questions pertaining to their products and share information with others. The information shared in an online community can also be converted into a knowledge base, which can be easily accessed by customers.
Forecast Spurts in Customer Requests with High Precision
Predicting an increase in support requests accurately is the holy grail of customer service management; leaders of customer service teams would like to know when there would be an uptick in customer support calls, so that they can deploy more agents to resolve the problems of their clients with high levels of efficacy. Managers would also like to know about the challenges customers are likely to face, so that they can come up with appropriate plans.
Businesses can use Salesforce to analyze product and customer interaction data in an effective manner to find out when there would be an upsurge in the number of customer queries very precisely; the CRM powerhouse comes with solid Machine Learning (ML) capabilities that allow organizations to build robust predictive data models. One of our clients in the IT space used Salesforce’s ML abilities to forecast an increase in requests for assistance from its customers after the launch of a new mobile app.
Empower Field Service Agents to Provide Good Customer Service
Several organizations face issues in delivering good field service, leading to low customer satisfaction levels. In many cases, managers of field service teams find it very hard to assign a task to an agent who has the required skills to provide a resolution to the customer’s problem, in a timely fashion.
This problem can be overcome very effectively, using Salesforce. The CRM system allows companies to automatically assign tasks to the right field service representative; Salesforce enables businesses to come up with smart schedules for field service personnel based on various criteria such as time, skill set, and location of the customer to enhance productivity. Salesforce also helps track movement of equipment to ensure the availability of the right tools for a job.
As you can see, Salesforce empowers businesses to deliver the best customer service, thereby helping them delight their clients. Companies are advised to partner with a reputed Salesforce services company to make the best use of the powerful CRM system to meet their customer service needs; they must make sure the organization fully comprehends their unique requirements before inking a deal.
Hope you liked the post. How do you provide first-rate services to your customers?
