Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a tool for your client-facing teams. These teams can support your customers in technical, business to business, business to consumer, or blended ways. The beauty of Service Cloud is that it can be extended to support teams of any size and support need. Salesforce always promotes how much efficiency gains you can get out of the Service Cloud platform. Those efficiency gains are only valuable if your team has them set up for scalable use and is trained on the tools while also being monitored that they actually use the tools. In this blog, we will review 4 features that when rolled out effectively will create success for your teams.

MACROS for Emailing

Email is one of the key support channels for a company. Support doesn’t have to start with email but may get transitioned from a phone call or chat to email if the process requires follow-up. This process in an aging Salesforce account can be counterproductive. An account I worked on once had 4200+ email templates. The number one feedback from leadership was that the team wasn’t even using email templates. They had templates they used most stored on a one drive so they could get to them quickly and send them. This meant links, dates, etc were not maintained and created even more issues for the support teams. A lot of Salesforce accounts have an email template graveyard and with some proper access level, you can make sure that support can only see 100-200 templates of the graveyard. 100-200 is still a lot! If you properly roll out Service Cloud features you can add Macros to your support process. These macros can be named for the thing they may need to do like a refund and can even be limited to only working when refund is selected on a case. This takes the searching away from the user and presents them with what they need. This isn’t effective if you turn all 200 items into Macros without strategy and training.

Using a Macro to Populate the Email Action

Quick Text

You may have a business model that is business to business and business to consumer. Rather than creating email templates for each business model you could create one template and then have quick text that can be used to update the language for the situation. Maybe your brand voice dictates that you address consumers by their first name but b2b clients by salutation and last name. Your team shouldn’t have to type this out every time – give them a quick text and let the system fill it in. If there are quick answers to common questions in chat or email give your team text so they don’t have to copy and paste it from some other source. Our goal for service agents should be to keep them in the same system as much as possible. This quick text can even extend to your Knowledge base. Sometimes your knowledge base has internal and external information and without some customization may not be appropriate for customers so simply pdf’ing your knowledge article for the customer could present challenges. Think of how many times Apple has to answer a warranty claim, phone battery issue, or similar. If there are simple steps that can reset the phone or get the customer to see their warranty information the agent can send that with a quick text from the article in a wrap-up email – saving you an email template.

Quick Text Setup –

Quick Text Usage

Knowledge

As mentioned above some teams need to use Knowledge so that they can ensure team members have the most up-to-date troubleshooting information, product specifications, or other relevant information. Emailing out the information cant ensure that when agents get back from a weekend or vacation that they have that information. Putting it in Salesforce Knowledge ensures that once published, the next time agents load the Knowledge article they are operating off the information you want them to see. Call center employees get into a routine and may not review that article, but by having them attach the article to the case, it makes them acknowledge what they referenced to support the case. This will help you investigate issues when a customer has information that may not have been correct or help in Quality Control audits in support centers.

Easy to Attach an Article for an Agent

Omni-Channel Routing

Does your customer support team support more than one channel – chat, email, phone, etc? Does the team support a variety of complex issues? Measuring a team by the number of closed cases doesn’t actually provide a good KPI to measure a team member’s success. In a support team with different complexities or channels agents could “Cherry Pick” the type of support they provide or the issues they are willing to work on. Omni-Channel takes the insight into the work away from the agents and only assigns them work they are skilled to perform. Team members are more motivated to work the queue when the assignment is random because other people cannot have work avoidance and only take the easy work to boost their numbers. Additionally, having different weights to the work so your team isn’t taking 10 chats and 2 emails at the same time is important. With Omni-Channel your care agent could take one difficult chat and 1 email at the same time. As they complete one chat and wrap it up they could get the next email in the queue if there is no chat waiting. This ensures your oldest cases are addressed first while ensuring that active customers are not being left without support. If Omni-Channel is built well you also have the power to skill agents to different needs throughout the day – maybe you are getting slammed on chat so you want to take people away from working the queue and move them to exclusively chat and let the emails wait until it slows down.

Agent Ability to Easily use Omni-Channel and work presented to them

Now that you have some ideas on how to increase efficiencies using Salesforce Service Cloud. We would love to help you further imagine ways to improve your support process or help implement these features in a scalable and interactive approach that makes the most impact for your support teams. Support teams have a challenging job and we find it rewarding to improve the support agents daily life. We would love to work on projects about Salesforce Service Cloud with you!

If you’ve just gone live with your Salesforce implementation, be sure to check out this helpful post on what you need to do after implementing Salesforce. If you still have some questions feel free to reach out to us. 

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.