For those that weren’t lucky enough to attend this year’s Dreamforce conference – check out this great session we co-presented with our client, Constant Contact, on their implementation of Community Cloud.

The video clocks in at about 35 minutes but with best practices on migrating from portals, screenshots of a real community, and some great lessons learned, it’s well worth your time!

Special shout-out to Kara Allen – communities guru and project lead for Constant Contact who helped bring their story to life.

At a recent partner event here in San Francisco – I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of the Chatter/Communities roadmap for Winter ’15 and beyond.

A new feature “Recommendations in the Feed” got me thinking about some very interesting long term possibilities for Chatter and Communities.

The Feature

Recommendations in Winter ’15 are going to be very basic – just the tip of the iceberg. They will only do two things:

• Recommend groups to join
• Recommend that users setup the “Today” app – and provide an easy button to start that process

Recommendation displayed natively in the feed

The Vision

With only two types of recommendations – it’s likely that most people will breeze past this feature in Winter ’15.

But what if we imagine that recommendations are customizable? Then a number of really interesting possibilities come to mind,

• Marketing/Sales/Support can create recommendations to drive certain behaviors
• Recommendations could target specific types of users
• Recommendations will display natively in the feed and not disrupt the user experience (like a popup or banner)

All you need to do is take one look at how Twitter and Instagram approach native advertising in their feed to realize how valuable a feature like this would be.

The ability to customize these recommendations is likely 2-3 releases away still, but taking the time to think about the future is part of who we are at Perficient.

As always feel free to leave comments or find us on Twitter @Perficient!

Having worked with clients across industries and around the world – one thing about customer service is clear: the more you know about your customers and their experience, the better you can anticipate and serve their needs.

I’m sure you’ll agree that as a customer, it feels good to be acknowledged by name and appreciated for your business. On the flipside, being asked who you are, what you bought, or why you’re calling, can feel like a slap to the face. If you want to deliver “wow” and streamline the entire support process, don’t ask, know!

How do you go from asking to knowing? We’ve put together a few approaches based on our experience and while the end results may seem like magic to your customers, no rabbits or top hats are required. While you read, ask yourself “how does our support team score on each of these options?” and let us know how you do!

1) Be Prepared

Stop asking basic questions by making sure your support tool (hopefully something as powerful as Service Cloud) has all the core customer data (names, contact info, sales history, etc) available for your agents. To get that data all in one place, you may need complex integrations to other systems and sources of data. While no set of customer data is ever perfect, that’s no excuse for not consolidating what you have and making it available to your team.

2) Be Empathetic

Knowing vs asking is not just about having the right data available – it requires empathy and an understanding of the customer journey. That means your entire support team should use your product as much as possible and experience issues firsthand. But don’t stop at support – every part of the company has an important role to play: sales, product, engineering, even finance. That’s one of the reasons making everyone do customer support when they join is an incredible idea.

3) Be Smart

If you’ve made it this far – you’ve got the basics needed to ask less and know more. If you’re like me, though, you will never be satisfied with just the basics! That’s where smart use of technology comes in. Recent apps like Next Caller and Klink, for example, turn the concept of caller ID on its head and save you the trouble of storing detailed contact info for every customer.

By far, the best recently released app that supports my “don’t ask, know!” philosophy has to be FullStory, allowing you to track every customer interaction on your site or product so you know exactly where the experience broke down.

FullStory allows you to “play back” customer sessions on your site or app

Bottom line – keep your eyes open for possibilities and don’t be afraid to challenge the methods or technologies you currently use to track customer data.

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Each one of the approaches above takes time, thought, and plenty of effort to be successful, but I hope I’ve impressed upon you the importance of knowing as much as possible about your customers and their experience. If you were reading along and evaluating your own support team – let us know how you did! Feel free to give us a shout with your comments or let us know if we missed something big.

It’s that time again! Summer ’14 release is almost here and after firing up a brand new pre-release org and reading through the notes, here is my take on the top 5 new features for Service Cloud and Communities.

1. Quick Text is everywhere!
   • Now you can use Quick Text in pretty much every part of the console, whether it’s logging a call, or adding a case comment.
2. Email publisher in Salesforce1
   • Agents and support teams on the go can now respond to cases via email with the Salesforce1 app.
3. Community Templates for Site.com
   • Two new templates for Site.com allow you to quickly stand up a self-service site with knowledge search and basic case management. Not to mention they are both responsive!

4. Next-Gen Knowledge Search (Pilot)
   • Salesforce is offering a new Knowledge search using industry standard Apache Solr, improving over the standard Knowledge search with faster indexing and more relevant results.
5. Questions in Chatter
   • The Q&A functionality from Chatter Answers is now available in regular Chatter Feeds. This means that people can ask questions, instantly see similar questions, and get a “best answer” from another user.

As usual – the release is packed with enhancements and new features for Service Cloud and Communities. What are you looking forward to the most?

Making it easy for support teams to escalate issues and collaborate with engineering is one of the most common requirements we hear during Service Cloud implementations. More often than not – the engineering or development teams are using JIRA to track issues and manage the product backlog.

So how do you connect Service Cloud with JIRA? We’ll give you our take on some of the best options, from connectors to custom web service integration.

Connectors

Each of the connectors below is available as an AppExchange package and requires some setup on both the Service Cloud and JIRA side.

• Go 2 Group
  • Pros: One of the more feature rich connectors, custom mapping, can configure case comment visibility, allows linking of multiple cases to JIRA tickets, maps incoming JIRA tickets to accounts/contacts in Service Cloud
  • Cons: May have difficulty supporting multiple JIRA tickets associated to one case
  • Pricing: ~$2000 per year

• Wikidsmart
  • Pros: Supports many to many mapping of JIRA tickets/cases, view/update JIRA tickets in Service Cloud, comes with Confluence integration and others
  • Cons: More expensive due to additional integrations, may be overkill for Service Cloud/JIRA use case
  • Pricing: ~$10,000/year

• Service Rocket
  • Pros: Simple user based pricing, quick setup and configuration, supports multiple tickets to one case
  • Cons: No control over visibility of comments synced from JIRA
  • Pricing: ~$10 per 10 users per year

Custom Web Service/API

If you need full control over the integration process between Service Cloud and JIRA and you have resources who understand how to work with APIs, then custom web services may also be an option worth looking at.

Salesforce has both SOAP and REST based APIs which allow approved external systems to query data, create records, and make updates. Salesforce can also send outbound messages, or make API calls to a JIRA endpoint, for the purpose of creating new tickets, updating fields, or adding new comments/attachments.

Custom Integration

• Pros: Full control over what data gets sent and when, no ongoing license costs from a connector
• Cons: Will need to rebuild much of the functionality available out of the box with connectors, need development resources on both JIRA and Salesforce side

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Generally speaking, a connector is the simplest, and most straightforward approach for making Service Cloud and JIRA talk. Of the three connectors we’ve presented above, we have generally found Go2Group’s version to be the most configurable and powerful.

If you’ve had JIRA integration experience – or are looking into it – feel free to leave us a comment or get in touch @Perficient!

While CTI technology in recent years (especially Salesforce’s Open CTI platform) has helped make the phone experience more intelligent for customers and agents, a new service from NextCaller aims to turn the traditional concept of caller ID on its head.

NextCaller is the most recent in a trend of new services (similar to Datacoup and others) that offer value on both sides of the consumer/business coin. With these services, consumers typically get something useful for free (or even get paid) while businesses pay on the back end for access to that consumer data.

So how does NextCaller work?

Businesses can put this button on their support site

1. Consumers sign up for free and fill out a basic profile (including language, contact info, billing info even)
2. In return they get to cut to the front of the phone queue when they call a company who uses the NextCaller service
3. When the support agent takes that call, they get instant access to the customer’s profile/billing info (regardless of whether that customer is in the CRM or not)
4. Businesses pay 10 cents for every customer profile they access through NextCaller

It’s a win-win situation for both consumers and businesses, and according to NextCaller, the 10 cent per profile cost is easily justified:

Inbound identification can cost $2 per call, including name, address, and billing info. Our data-rich profiles can reduce these costs by up to 90 percent.

What does this mean for companies on the Service Cloud platform? NextCaller already has an API available that could be easily called from the Service Cloud console when a new call comes in. I would also expect that an AppExchange package or a pre-built integration will be available in the near future.

The service is of course only as good as the data it can provide to businesses, but it is a promising new option for a very painful part of the phone support experience.

Let us know what you think, would you try using NextCaller? Either as a consumer or a business? Leave us a comment or reach out @perficient.

We believe that demonstrating respect for your customers is the best way to keep them happy and engaged. But what does “demonstrating respect” mean in the context of customer support? It could translate to,

• Being transparent about your policies and acknowledging issues when they arise
• Providing customers with valuable self-help resources so they are empowered to solve their own problems
• Guiding customers to the right support channel based on their issue and need
• Bringing support to your customers, wherever they are (in your product or on mobile devices)

Turning these scenarios into reality often requires both a smart use of technology AND a clear organizational policy built on mutual respect. Today I’m going to showcase a company that has implemented an innovative blend of technology and policy to great success.

Riot Games is the Los Angeles based developer of the free-to-play online game “League of Legends”. With over 27 million players daily, it makes sense that “Player Experience First” is the #1 tenet of their manifesto.

Riot has taken a common challenge faced by many companies (reports of abusive behavior/language) and demonstrated incredible respect for their player base by building The Tribunal.

When a player is frequently reported by other players for abusive behavior, a tribunal case is automatically created. Other players then review the case and pass judgement (pardon or punish). Riot has offered incentives in the past for passing judgement, but many players participate because they care about the quality of the community.

By building The Tribunal system Riot has,

• Demonstrated respect for their players by trusting them to review cases and pass judgement
• Saved an incredible amount of time for their customer support team (they no longer need to review these cases)
• Helped capture and keep an 80% share of all gamers in their space

This blend of innovative technology and policy is a win-win situation, and something that many companies could benefit from emulating, regardless of industry.

It’s just like any successful relationship, don’t just tell your customers they are #1, show them why!

Thoughts, comments, ideas? Leave a comment or reach out @perficient.

With hundreds of implementations under our collective belt, Perficient’s Service Cloud Practice has worked with an incredible range of companies, business models, and end customers.

Being data nerds at heart, we’re always on the lookout for trends and patterns among this diverse group. Clients like Activision, Minted, Kabam, and Twitter have taught us that much like the tech world at large, consumer focused companies tend to be ahead of the curve with customer support too.

Today’s consumer – more power than ever.
(Image from http://www.exacttarget.com/products/web-personalization)7

Today we ask, what are these companies doing so well and what can our other B2B clients learn from their unique approach to support?

Let’s start with some common data points and characteristics from our B2C clients, what do they have in common?

• High volume of transactions (a large customer base means lots of cases!)
• A larger percentage of usability/enablement questions vs technical issues/bugs
• Product/market is growing rapidly, support org structure is changing and not afraid to experiment
• Technology is at the core of their business and customer experience

In a challenging high-growth environment, how do these companies maintain a high quality support experience? Every company and industry has unique challenges but we’ve distilled our learnings into three key areas that almost always drive success and customer satisfaction.

1) Self-service is king

B2C companies are forced to make self-service a priority in order to scale but it’s really the best strategy no matter what your business is. Our B2B clients are investing more and more in features like peer to peer support, mobile support, in-app knowledge, and Google-style easy search, with great returns. With self-service in the B2C world, it’s not about deflection, it’s about creating empowered and invested customers who can help themselves.

2) High volume, high quality

Every support organization struggles with efficiency; the battle between headcount and customer satisfaction is probably as old as time. From a traditional B2B point of view, our B2C clients may seem “picky” about agent experience and productivity, but they know that every unnecessary click delays the moment of customer gratification. Companies like Activision and Twitter prove it’s possible to scale efficiently without sacrificing the quality.

3) Make evangelists, not enemies

Our B2C clients don’t have traditional sales teams – they understand that customer evangelists are a powerful sales tool.  The same holds true for B2B companies as well. So how do our clients grow these super customers?

• Establish a foundation of trust and respect by offering quality self-help resources
• Provide a positive support experience, even when there’s a problem or issue out of your control
• Don’t be afraid open up about issues and share your roadmap plans – be flawsome!
• Recognize customers who help others and are passionate about your product (start with retweets/reposts and start building an MVP program)

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B2C companies may have pioneered these concepts, but I think you’ll agree that these three areas are critical for almost any support organization, regardless of size, model, or industry. Thoughts, comments, something we missed? Follow @PRFTSalesforce or leave a comment to chat.

If you saw our overview post last week on making search work in Communities – you’re probably looking for more info on each option.

Here at Perficient we believe that “seeing is believing”. For each search option covered in our previous post, here are some screenshots and details to help you figure out which option is best for your community.

1) Global Search

As of the very first Communities release, external users now have access to the same Global Search capabilities available to standard Salesforce users. That means the ability to search across all objects and chatter posts, smart filters, and direct links to files and results. Despite that great functionality, Global Search is not the most user friendly search experience. It can be overwhelming with a large set of results, and functions as a pure keyword search (not natural language).

Recommendation: Standard Global Search is free and great for newer communities, but not optimized for service communities or self-service.

2) Knowledge / Q&A

For service communities – the out of box Knowledge search tab or the search process built into Q&A (Chatter Answers) offers a great way to drive self-service/deflection. However the search results are limited to knowledge articles and community questions/answers. These two tabs do not provide a global search of other objects/data from Salesforce.

Recommendation: Great for service communities that are primarily focused on self-service and peer-to-peer interaction but confusing for end users as they can only be accessed from their respective tabs (Knowledge and Q&A) and do not include other data from the Community.

3) Custom Visualforce

Marketo’s Community Search (Marketo is a Perficient client)

With Visualforce you can craft a search experience that targets the exact objects/data sources you need and presents the information in a branded, user friendly fashion. The downside is an increased development cost and the lack of some native search functionality (for example, Salesforce tracks all searches done through the standard Knowledge tab so you can report on popular search terms).

Recommendation: Great for communities where branding, UI, and UX are critical (like the Marketo community above), but requires more development effort up front.

4) Third Party Search

Example from Tableau using the Google Search Appliance to index multiple sources.

Coveo let’s you choose multiple sources to be indexed.

This last option may often be the highest in terms of effort and cost – but the various third party search tools available provide a powerful set of features for indexing multiple data sources, searching large sets of data, and using natural language search. This subject area could be take up an entire post on its own, but we’ll list a few options here for now,

• Google Search Appliance – harness Google’s own search algorithms to index and search your own data sets with blazing fast performance. Perficient is a GSA Partner with a dedicated practice.
• Coveo – available as an AppExchange package – Coveo can index multiple objects and data sources. The app also provides search UI that can be exposed in a community or on a case page (for internal search).
• Intelliresponse / Virtual Assistant – also available on the AppExchange, these Virtual Agent apps provide an entirely different search experience, based on recognizing the question being asked by your customers and returning the right content.

Recommendation: These options are all powerful and can add significant value, but come with an additional cost over standard Salesforce Communities. They are a better fit for large scale, enterprise portals/communities, with integrations and multiple data sources.

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If you’re rolling out a new community or planning to soon – think about the search experience you want for your end users. Each option has its pros and cons, so let us know if you have questions or feedback on your experience with Communities and search.

A vibrant community with an engaged user base will usually contain an incredible amount of valuable content. But as content grows, how do users get connected with the right article that answers their question (in a service community), or the right piece of enablement content that helps them sell (in sales community)?

The search bar we all know and love.

The preferred option for many users is, of course, search. With Google Search being ubiquitous to the point of becoming a verb, users increasingly expect company portals, sites, and communities to be easily searchable.

So how does search work with Salesforce Communities? Read on for part 1 of 2 with a table of options ranging from fully native to fully custom. Part 2 of this blog series will include more details for each option.

Questions? Feedback on these options? Let us know and be sure to check back next week for our follow-up post on search, including more details and examples for each option above.

As an implementation partner, we really enjoy working with the Communities platform. The built in collaboration with Chatter and the flexibility of configuration make Communities a major upgrade over traditional portals. But today I’m going to highlight another key benefit of that platform: branding and design with Salesforce Site.com.

Site.com is free to use with Communities and it offers a host of configurable, drag and drop options for doing UI design and branding. If you want a branded, polished look and feel for your community but want to avoid custom Visualforce development, Site.com could be a great option for you.

Enough with the introductions though, let’s get into some specific use cases for Site.com in a community!

1) Custom Home Page

Drag and drop to add page elements!

Every community/portal/site needs a home page – it’s the first thing users see when they login and ideally it’s the core of your community experience. With data tables, Site.com makes it incredibly easy to expose any data from a Salesforce object in a Site.com page. So with a few clicks you can create a new widget for your sidebar that shows current open cases, or assets owned by the customer, or hot leads for partners. You can drop in a Chatter Feed widget and with a few hours of effort you’ve got a custom home page with collaboration up and running.

2) Forms

Choosing fields for a Site.com form is quick and easy

With any portal or community – users need to view data but also interact and create their own. Creating a case in a service community or a new deal reg in a sales/channel community are both actions supported by standard SFDC objects and page layouts, but what if you want to style the page differently? Or add more information to the form? With a few clicks you can select an object, choose your fields, and drag a brand new form on to any Site.com page.

3) Community Navigation

Lastly – a simple and clear navigation menu is key for making your community/portal/site user friendly and engaging. While you can of course use standard SFDC tabs – you’ll likely want something more in line with your product or corporate branding. Site.com has an easy to use menu component – that automatically generates your menu based on pages you’ve created. Add your own CSS/images and you’ve got a fully functional menu that’s branded and easy to update.

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Salesforce is continuing to add new features & widgets to the Site.com library so we strongly recommend that you take a look before your next community initiative. For other community-centric content – click here or leave a comment to get in touch.

Admins, Support Managers, and Agents rejoice! The Spring ’14 Release is PACKED with Service Cloud goodness so I wanted to share my picks for the most interesting/useful features. Of course, you can also read through the entire 325 pages of Release Notes if you love geeking out on new features like I do.

1. Business Hours for Milestones

First up, a feature that’s near and dear to my heart gets a huge improvement in flexiblity: you can now apply different business hours at the individual milestone level. You can now set your “first response” target for P1 cases to absolute 24/7 time, but set the target for lower priority P3/P4 cases in business days.

2. Multi-monitor Support in the Console

If you’re all about productivity and efficiency, chances are you work with multiple monitors. Now you can pin, move, and re-size almost every component in the console; you’re no longer restricted to a single browser window/monitor.

3. Topics on Cases

Who doesn’t like tagging records on the fly? With the topics widget for cases, you get free-form tags for cases, but the best part is that they tie into topics on chatter posts, files, and all other data in your Salesforce org. Use topics for tagging suspicious cases that might be related to a specific issue or just grouping similar cases you want to come back to.

4. Report on Knowledge Data Categories

If you use Knowledge (and if you have customers, you should be) you can now reference data categories in your reports. This is huge as it opens up the ability to report on article effectiveness by your different product lines, article types, or whatever else you use categories for.

5. Social Customer Service

With Social Objects and Social Publishers – agents in the console can now manage social channels efficiently and effectively. The Social Customer Service feature is a way to connect your Radian6 social listening power with the efficiency and flexibility of the console and the case feed. It’s not enabled by default though so if you have Radian6 and use the console, ask support to enable this feature post Spring ’14.

This is just a sampling of some of the great features coming in Spring ’14, which is shaping up to be an absolutely awesome release for Service Cloud.

As always, let us know if you have any questions or want to share what you’re excited about for the next release.