Some companies are still of the misunderstanding that Salesforce CRM® is only a sales tool. That could not be further from the truth!
Salesforce CRM helps drive productivity within your business walls and beyond. It assists staff from all departments including, but not limited to, Services, Marketing and Accounts.
Salesforce has three major updates every year and its options are limitless, growing and evolving alongside your business. In fact, Salesforce.com® launched the Service Cloud in 2009 but, like many of us, people have been using Salesforce for marketing, services, and other functions well before this time.
Today I’m going to cover Case Management – an area that is completely new to me! My blog will cover what it is and how simple it is for your customers to use. My blog next week will cover what it does, how easy it is to use for your contact centre agents and how it helps drive productivity and customer satisfaction. Case Management falls within Salesforce Service Cloud which helps manage the complete lifecycle of customer service through multi-channels including phone, email, websites, social media networks, self-service portals and search engines.
What are cases and why is communication so important!
Cases are a description of a customer’s feedback, problems, ideas and queries and Case Management is how your organisation handles these. If your business wants your Contact Centre and/or Technical Services Support – whatever you may call it – to deliver great customer service and meet their Service Level Agreements (SLA), it is vital to understand how to improve this area of your business. As I’ve read through what Salesforce Case Management is capable of I have been amazed at it’s potential.
Firstly, from customer satisfaction, perspective cases can be logged 24 hours a day via a variety of communication channels that resonate with individual customers.
These Multi-channels of communication include:
Email-to-case
Automatically creates a case in Salesforce using the information within the email to auto-populate Salesforce fields. The case goes into a queue and can be assigned to the best person depending on the assignment rules that have been set ensuring your customers get the quickest resolution to their issues. While the case is being worked, the customer has been alerted informing them that the case has been received and that they will be contacted soon.
Web-to-case
Very similar to email-to-case, with the exception that the web form fields are those that are directly associated and auto-populate the Salesforce fields.
Phone Call
The contact centre staff member types up the case as customers call with their feedback, problems or queries. These cases go into the queue and are resolved in exactly the same process.
Social Networks
Salesforce connects to where your customers are via Google, Twitter and Facebook ensuring you can automate and monitor social chat and provide closed loop follow up.
Live Agent
Enables you to incorporate real-time web chat into your contact centre case submission processes
Self Service Communities
Enable your customers to use Salesforce Knowledge and collaborate through Salesforce Chatter to resolve their cases faster and on their own.
Allowing customers to connect with your contact centre the way in which they feel most comfortable helps build rapport, trust and confidence. Once the case is received by the contact centre agent, the resolution process is exactly the same no matter what channel the case was delivered. This is where it really gets interesting, efficient and streamlined for all those involved. I will cover this part of Case Management in next week’s blog. I hope you join me.
