The age of the digital marketer and a new era of marketing is upon us. At the Salesforce Connections conference this week in New York, attendees are getting insider’s access to a wealth of knowledge and best practices using Salesforce from digital marketing leaders at BMW, Honeywell, Panera Bread and Weight Watchers, and as well as a sneak peek at the next generation of the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud. One of the key messages we’ve heard so far from the event – Salesforce recognizes that you need to deliver sales, service AND marketing experiences through a single platform. Customers no longer “like” seamless interactions they expect them. This means the lines between these business functions has blurred and digital marketers need to engage customers at every step of their journey.
Recent research from Ovum suggests that contact centers are missing the mark with customer care. In order to support the age of the connected, multi-channel customer, businesses are tailoring their customer service tools to match new customer expectations. To do this, understanding the relationship between support interactions, channels and integration of technologies across the customer lifecycle is critical to keeping customers happy and engaged. So what areas of investment and top priorities are companies focused on? Social, live chat and self-service – all functionality that Salesforce delivers with a single platform through Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and Communities.
In case you couldn’t make it to this year’s Salesforce Connections event, we thought we’d bring some additional customer insights and Salesforce best practices to you through some examples of how we’ve helped organizations blend marketing and service to enhance the customer experience and improve loyalty.
Using Social Media for ‘Always On’ Omni-channel Support
The traditional model of waiting for customer questions, complaints and orders to come into the call center has just been supercharged. As part of an omni-channel strategy, a leading outdoor clothing company is using social media as another entry point to the Customer Service center to deliver multiple benefits. First, it allows Customer Service agents to maintain a high utilization level by finding customers that need help between calls, chats or when they’re caught up with the case queue. Second, social media customer service allows agents to be proactive in finding vocal customers and turn them into brand advocates. These same customers that raise questions or complaints on social media are just as likely to praise a company when their inquiries are handled before they call, chat or email customer service.
Perficient helped the client set up Salesforce as the single system to handle chat, email, phone, social media and a third party product rating platform, BazaarVoice, to meet your customers where they are, when they are in real-time. Salesforce was also integrated with their marketing database using Informatica to capture purchase history information and provide service agents with customer information relevant to the customer support process. Both of these types of customer interactions with the brand (social and purchase history) enabled the brand to see measurable customer satisfaction results from its omni-channel marketing and service strategy.
Engaging the Gaming Community
Activision decided that they needed to improve the scalability of the customer support organization and chose to create a peer-to-peer capability called their Ambassador program where “certified” gamers could help answer questions from the community and provide technical support. Using Live Agent available in Service Cloud, Perficient helped Activision develop a “Question Hub” that delivers a consistent user experience and uses gamification to increase engagement and participation from the gamer community to deliver a social peer-to-peer customer service model.
Is your company equipped to deliver on an omni-channel strategy? We’d love to hear how you’re using Salesforce to meet new digital marketing and service demands!
