This is the season when customer service departments experience a high volume of inquiries. It’s especially true in retail with the holiday shopping season, but B2B is also busy with end of year goals to achieve.
We’re all exposed to customer service this time of year, as consumers, providers or both. What makes a good customer experience? On the consumer side, you want your questions answered quickly and completely, through the contact channel of your choice, making you feel like a valued and intelligent customer who makes smart buying decisions. On the business side you’re also interested in time to successful resolution, agent productivity, call handling processes, and other performance metrics.
In addition, the challenge of providing excellent customer service is complicated because customers want a seamless experience across the phone, web and mobile, which leaves customer service managers with a proliferation of channels to integrate.
At Perficient, we recommend Salesforce Service Cloud as the industry-best solution to optimize your customer service operations. We recently hosted a popular webinar on the topic—“Unlock the Power of the Service Cloud”—where customer service directors discovered new and more efficient ways to provide outstanding service and support. You can view the webinar here. If you were at Dreamforce 2013, you probably already saw the exciting enhancements in the latest edition of Service Cloud.
The Service Cloud gives CSRs easy access to their cases and accounts in a single view, called a Case Feed. This allows agents to quickly see the latest info on case, or refer back as needed to previous interactions with a customer. Plus there’s same-screen access to relevant knowledge bases. And predictive analytics is used to show the agent other cases similar to the current one. All these functions help a CSR resolve a service interaction faster and easier than before, resulting in a more satisfying experience on the customer side and greater efficiency on the business side.
Support for mobile interaction is another function the Service Cloud offers, which is important in an era when an increasing percentage of consumers are using mobile devices to contact your organization. A user-friendly mobile experience not only helps improve and expedite customer interactions, it helps to solidify and strengthen your brand in the eyes of consumers.
“Unlock the Power of the Service Cloud” also highlighted a powerful new solution called Instant Insights for the contact center. Instant Insights leverages the power of Salesforce.com to eliminate inefficient call handling processes, ineffective training, and time-consuming quality control procedures.
Unlike traditional systems that monitor a random sampling of calls for quality assurance, Instant Insights identifies outlier calls in real-time and notifies managers who can quickly intervene to coach CSRs. In addition, the solution segments CSRs into quartiles rather than using traditional stack ranking methods, making it easier to manage and train CSRs on measurable performance.
Evaluating Instant Insights should be part of your 2014 plan for improving your call center. You can learn more about Salesforce Service Cloud and Instant Insights by watching the on-demand webinar, “Unlock the Power of the Service Cloud” (45 minutes).
For more information, please contact sales@perificent.com or call 877-276-2120
