How to Spend your Leftover Customer Service Budget

It’s that time of the year again – just a few short weeks in 2017 and 2018 is going to be knocking at your door!

But in order to keep your customer service budget from shrinking next year, you need to make sure to spend all leftovers.

So how do you spend it? Simple! You invest it in something that will give you a head-start for 2018.
Here are five ideas on spending your leftover customer service budget that will help you be more efficient in 2018. The best part? They are all executable on a short notice!

1. Implement a Search Solution

Customers love self-service. Millennials, especially want to access maximum information on their own and resolve their queries with minimum interaction with a human support agent. Moreover, case deflection and self-service go hand in hand, as customers are able to resolve their queries without having to interact with the customer support team.

Simply put, you make help content available to the customer across different channels that they may possibly use. This mitigates the need to log a case.

2. Optimize Process through Integrations

With 3.75 million subscribers and, 2700 AppExchange apps with 3 million total installs, Salesforce is clearly the leader in the CRM space. Besides using the Salesforce platform, organizations also rely on platforms like JIRA, Slack, Zendesk, VersionOne, etc. for other internal and external process-specific purposes.

This proliferation of multiple platforms results in a disintegrated system that leads to:

• Lack of visibility into business processes
• Creation of information silos
• Low productivity and efficiency

Therefore, a highly-integrated eco-system is required to get maximum ROI.

For instance, with Service Cloud and JIRA integration, an organization can derive the following benefits:

• 100% transparency into each case
• Increased productivity
• Faster and smoother resolution of cases
• Improved overall customer experience

3. Automate Manual Processes

In a highly competitive world, the quest for improved productivity and efficiency along with reduced costs has resulted in many enterprises considering automation. According to a recent survey, 56% of firms are either automating processes, or plan to do so in a year.

By automating their warranty validation process, one of our clients was able to validate and process customer requests as well as improve their support rep’s productivity. After this automated validation, the support rep was able to check and process the replacement with a simple click of an approval button. The customer received the approval via email, along with a link to print a prepaid FedEx label, using which they could ship the product for replacement.

4. Invest in an Online Community

A thriving online community allows the company a front row seat to what the customers think about your brand, and how they’re feeling about your company in general. In fact, according to a report by the Aberdeen Group, companies with online communities see a 40% greater profit margin per account.
If you are looking for something that will give you returns in the long run, it is profitable to invest your precious dollars to build an online community. Some community platforms to consider are Salesforce.

5. Track Customer Service with Analytics

Customer experience, user experience, data and analytics – these words work great in unison! In other words, by gaining a complete view of your customer, you’re one step closer to perfecting your relationship, leading to higher satisfaction. According to a report, 90% of business managers believe analytics has the ability to improve sales.

Our client, a SaaS-based B2B marketing automation platform did not have clear visibility into accounts’ health due to an unorganized workflow, which was affecting the overall support performance. The experts at Grazitti developed an AHMS(Account Health Monitoring System) in Salesforce Service Cloud, where the customer could easily get insights into account health, measure their customers’ satisfaction, and take corrective measures to improve the support quality.

These are just a couple things you can do to put those remaining dollars to work for you. Do you have more ideas? Tweet us at @Grazitti or comment below!

About Grazitti Interactive®