Boosting Support Team Efficiency in Salesforce Service Cloud

Customer service is a huge competitive edge for businesses to win more customers and ROI. According to a Zendesk report, 60% of customers have purchased from a brand solely based on the service they expect to receive.^[i]

To provide exceptional customer service, most service teams use Salesforce Service Cloud. Salesforce Service Cloud is a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) platform for Salesforce clients to provide service and support to their customers.

With its host of functionalities to manage support operations, it enables agents to resolve customer issues quickly, personalize customer experiences, and enhance customer lifetime value.

The Need to Boost Support Team Efficiency

In the era of customer-centricity, providing top-notch customer experience (CX) is key. A pivotal element in achieving this CX is the efficiency of your support team.

Customers expect quick and relevant solutions to their problems and your responses shape how they view and engage with your brand. This directly influences customer satisfaction and loyalty and provides you with –

Improved User Adoption

Service teams are responsible for effectively onboarding and supporting a customer’s journey throughout. An efficient support team can provide better assistance to users, leading to higher levels of adoption and reduced churn rate.

Faster Issue Resolution

According to reports, 90% of customers expect an immediate response to their queries.^[ii] By streamlining your support processes, you can resolve customer issues quickly and boost their overall experiences.

Lower Support Expenses

Efficient support operations lead to better resource allocation and reduced number of prolonged cases. This helps lower the staffing requirements, thus, resulting in cost savings.

Ways to Empower Support Team in Salesforce

1. Streamline Customer Support Workflows

When teams work on different platforms, it can disrupt workflows and exacerbate coordination problems. For example, your support team may use Salesforce to address customer concerns, while your development team uses a project management tool like Jira to resolve customer issues.

This often leads to data silos that hamper team performance. Support agents may struggle to access relevant data, causing delays in issue resolution. They might also need to manually enter data into both Salesforce and Jira, resulting in duplicate data entries. To prevent this and streamline communication, you need to integrate your Salesforce and Jira.

The integration facilitates a seamless data sync that aligns your support and development teams. With a Salesforce-Jira Connector, you can enable bi-directional synchronization to automate workflows and boost cross-functional coordination. It offers a one-click escalation that enables support reps to directly escalate cases that require engineering assistance, without leaving Salesforce. The engineering teams can then prioritize support tickets based on a defined set of rules to boost case resolution.

2. Automate Case Creation and Streamline Case Management

Given the large volume of customer queries, automation is vital to improving support team productivity. One tool that most companies use is the Salesforce Email-to-Case feature. This feature helps streamline customer service interactions by automatically converting customer emails into cases.

However, it comes with the challenge of duplication. A simple follow-up on an existing case can lead to a duplicate case. Moreover, when using auto-responder, an endless loop of new cases gets created due to email looping. This introduces chaos for both Salesforce users and customers, resulting in poor experiences.

To resolve this, you can use an advanced solution for Email-to-Case that streamlines case management. It goes beyond the standard capabilities to help you enhance case comments, manage communication on closed cases, and handle case creation from non-customers. This reduces the workload of support agents significantly and improves service efficiency to boost engagement quality.

3. Community Collaboration

Given the monotony of daily operations, maintaining consistent performance levels can be challenging for service agents. This can lead to longer resolution times, lower customer satisfaction scores, and inefficiencies in service delivery.

Gamification strategies within Salesforce Service Cloud are an effective way to foster employee engagement. However, Service Cloud gamification only has basic features such as recognition badges to acknowledge achievements. Moreover, the customization options are limited and are complex to set up.

To drive dynamic gamification, a Salesforce-native gamification solution can work wonders. With advanced game-like elements such as benchmark scoring, leaderboards, and badges, it induces a healthy sense of competition and motivates agents to achieve their goals faster.

It lets you reward and acknowledge agents for their contributions, set performance goals (benchmarks) for agents to track progress, and celebrate top performers via leaderboards to spur a healthy drive for excellence. This improves service quality and agent productivity, resulting in effective customer resolution.

4. Reduce Support License Costs and Achieve Quicker Case Resolutions

Handling repetitive customer queries increases your support team’s workload. Moreover, as the customer base grows, you need more user licenses in Salesforce and a bigger support team to accommodate them all. This increases your support expenses and reduces operational efficiency.

Additionally, many customers prefer to raise their queries in the community as it is quicker than logging a ticket in Salesforce Service Cloud. As most community posts are public, it also fosters a sense of transparency in support communications.

However, this creates unnecessary back-and-forth for the support team to address customer concerns. To resolve this, integrating your online community platform with Salesforce CRM is key. This integration allows customer queries from the community to appear directly in the support team’s Salesforce interface. This enables the team to access and respond to queries directly from Salesforce. This fast-tracks the entire case escalation and resolution while enhancing customer engagement.

Community and CRM integration creates a bi-directional synchronization that enables automated post-to-case escalation and hassle-free case management. This not only boosts the support team’s productivity but also reduces the need for more licenses, thus, saving costs.

5. Centralized Management of Field Service Operations

Field service technicians often find it challenging to ensure their teams are working efficiently. Getting work done on time, maintaining territory holiday management, and delegating and monitoring work are some of the major issues they have to deal with regularly.

Salesforce Field Service centralizes customer data to manage work orders efficiently and deliver faster customer service. The end-to-end field service management streamlines different stages of field service operations, including scheduling, inventory management, and task data utilization.

However, it has several limitations in each of these areas. For instance, in inventory management via the field service mobile app, workers have access to only one serialized product item per product work order. Also, technicians cannot assign any other appointment during a multi-day service appointment, and their overlapping appointments are not automatically resolved.

To mitigate this, you can leverage a Salesforce Field Service Lightning solution that boosts the capabilities of existing FSL implementation. It enhances the visualization of work orders on a certain location to reduce the back and forth of field agents. It also enables field service technicians to get details of their inventory upfront for efficient management. This leads to improved quality of field service, hence, providing amazing customer experiences.

The Bottom Line

Customer service is the key to retaining and extracting more value from your customers. But it is not without its fair share of problems. Fortunately, navigating customer service challenges is an inherent aspect of any business. And with appropriate strategies and tailored solutions, they can be effectively addressed and overcome.

We hope this blog post has provided you with some clarity on how you can streamline your support operations and optimize your team’s efficiency.

Interested in Learning More About Enhancing Customer Support in Salesforce? Talk to Us!

Statistical References:

[i] Zendesk – 51 Customer Service Statistics You Need To Know

[ii] HubSpot – Live Chat Exposes a Fatal Flaw in Your Go-to-Market