Newsflash! Customers expect a branded, consistent service experience just about everywhere. (Shocking, right?) While this news is not particularly ground-breaking, the way certain businesses are approaching the customer service challenge is. Customer communities offer a variety of important ways to connect with your customer: you can engage with them, send offers and other helpful information, and offer support.
But how?
Creating Customer Service with Salesforce Community Cloud
Salesforce Community Cloud is a great place to start. This online social platform enables companies to connect their people with the data and records they need to get work done — and do it in real-time, on any device.
When it comes to service, answering every customer question is a lot of work. Typically, there’s a team of people working tirelessly to soothe disgruntled users, fix problems, and generally improve the experience the customer has with the brand (usually after an issue).
Self-service communities empower customers to search a knowledge base, solve each other’s problems, and reduce the amount of cases the customer service team has to take on. And, as an added bonus, you’re able to define and reward your brand evangelists and community experts, which promotes even deeper customer loyalty with those customers and beyond.
At Perficient, “we firmly believe that communities are the backbone for creating the next-generation digital experience.
“As you think about your organization’s digital transformation, and how you can extend the power of Salesforce’s CRM and cloud platform to enhance the customer experience, Community Cloud is a perfect fit for exploring new opportunities to transform into a digital business and connect with your customers in a whole new way.
“Innovative brands are dreaming up new ways to utilize the product every day to boost sales, reduce service costs, fuel product innovation, and increase customer satisfaction.” (Engaging Your Online Community of Customers)
OpenTable Customer Community Offers a Customer Service Win
OpenTable is one of those aforementioned “innovative brands” as called out by Salesforce’s Service Cloud Senior Manager, John Houtsma:
Why is OpenTable’s Customer Community so Great?
The first thing people notice with this customer community example is the OpenTable consistent branding. This is so important when creating a seamless customer experience. Customers need to have the utmost trust in the brand — especially in service situations.
This community uses Knowledge articles, FAQs from OpenTable’s home page, and results in OpenTable’s ability to deflect cases while their customer get better, faster support. That equals a win/win service situation.
And, like the above post says, “every currently Salesforce EE and Service cloud customer can build an unauthenticated Help Center without purchasing any additional Communities licenses.” Let us know if we can help!
Check out the OpenTable Customer Community and the Salesforce Customer Story. What do you think? Would you find this useful as a customer? Leave your comments below.
