In the world of eCommerce, the pressure to meet and exceed customer expectations is only growing stronger. Research has shown that 89% of customers are willing to switch to another brand after just a single negative customer support experience.
Exceptional customer service and support functions are the hallmarks of any business serious about staking its claim as a successful and relevant industry leader.
Businesses who want to remain visible in our ever-more competitive attention economy need to invest in the digital tools necessary that allow them to meet customers on their preferred digital channel quickly and resolve customer issues quickly.
For many organisations, turning to Salesforce Service Cloud has been a seamless and beneficial decision. However, as with any tool with enormous potential, its efficacy and support capabilities can go to waste if businesses don’t utilise its full potential.
Read on to find out how you might be missing out on the full power of Service Cloud and what you can do to optimise your Service Cloud usage.
How Does Service Cloud Benefit Businesses?
Service Cloud is a CRM platform that provides functionalities that help businesses improve their customer support models and elevate their resolution capabilities. Through Service Cloud businesses can:
- strengthen customer relations
- boost employee productivity and
- reinforce customer data protection and security
As a CRM tool, Service Cloud offers, among other advanced functions, an analytics dashboard of each customer that tracks their service history, allowing agents to provide a speedier, more personalised customer experience.
What Could Be Preventing Your Business From Harnessing Service Cloud’s Full Potential?
But while Service Cloud offers a range of support and resolution capabilities, its comprehensive structure and function are complex. Without a thorough understanding of how Service Cloud works and what it can do, it can easily shift from being a helpful tool to a tiresome hurdle preventing productivity.
Service Cloud isn’t optimally integrated
Service Cloud is a versatile tool that can integrate with other tools (including your business website and apps) to provide a seamless, uninterrupted workflow for support agents.
However, if Service Cloud hasn’t been optimally integrated with other platforms and tools, it can cause breaks and disruptions in workflow. This may frustrate your support team and cause them to minimise their Service Cloud usage, complicating their tasks and increasing burnout levels.
Your support agents are too busy
This problem is somewhat of a double bind. Busy customer service and support agents may feel overwhelmed and don’t have the time to re-examine their manual processes to assess what they can automate and streamline them via Service Cloud.
As a result, they may be creating additional work for themselves unknowingly in a self-sustaining cycle and the busier they get, the less likely they’ll be to tap into Service Cloud’s capabilities and put routine tasks on autopilot.
Your company’s support needs have evolved
It’s also possible that your business needs have simply evolved and the level of Service Cloud you’re currently using is not sufficient. Generally, implementation is tied to budget which is influenced by the most urgent needs of the company.
If your business, as well as your support team, has expanded then your support and resolution needs aren’t the same as when you first sourced Service Cloud and you may need its more advanced, extended functionality.
No matter where your business is experiencing its support pain points, it will impact your customer support and service output, providing a less-than-stellar customer experience that may frustrate your customers.
How to Optimise Your Service Cloud Usage
- Identify workflow disruptions and their causes – The most important first step is to identify where disruptions are happening in your support and resolution workflows. Pinpointing where connection and communication breakdowns are occurring will help you determine what’s not working and what needs to change, whether it’s agent workload or scaling up your existing system so it can do more.
- Implement necessary updates and integrations – Make sure you’re taking advantage of all of Service Cloud’s integrative capabilities which make retrieving, analysing, sharing and updating customer and other data a quick and seamless process. Also, ensure that you’re routinely installing Service Cloud updates that improve its performance.
- Work with an experienced implementation partner – Service Cloud is an advanced CRM tool that has extensive capabilities but requires in-depth understanding and intuitive knowledge of its operations. For this reason, it’s best to partner with an expert implementation partner like CloudSmiths, who can guide you through Service Cloud as you implement it across your workforce and routinely consult with you to ensure you’re getting the most from its functionalities.
CloudSmiths is Africa’s largest Salesforce implementation partner and trusted advisor. We offer end-to-end Salesforce consultation, implementation, development and support services:
- Consulting and advisory services
- Salesforce development
- Salesforce licences
- Managed services and support
- Salesforce implementation
- Salesforce Training
