Increasing Case Deflection in Service Cloud to Reduce Support Costs

Salesforce launched Service Cloud to build something similar to Google for customer support operations. Today support operations in companies like Philips, Financial Times, Facebook, Virgin America, Opentable, P&G and many more are using Service Cloud and saving millions every year. More than 80% of companies have experienced improvements in their customer satisfaction within six months of switching to the Service Cloud. But, the differentiating factor is the ROI on Service Cloud. What can you do to maximize your investment in Service Cloud? The answer is by implementing case deflection for existing support processes. Take for instance, Marketo. Before Marketo implemented case deflection for their support community, they used to receive 3000 support cases per month. However, with better case deflection methods in place, they reduced the first-level support cases to 2000 cases per month. This translated into 20% less support costs.

Here are 4 ways to adopt and optimize case deflection mechanisms in Service Cloud:

1.Building a Robust Knowledge Base (KB)

Typically, the first action of a customer when they come across any issue is to call or email your customer support team. Instead of answering the same question over and over, you can direct customers to an online knowledge base before they submit or open a case/ticket. You can transform the knowledge base into one of the most powerful customer support tools as it empowers your customers to resolve issues independently. A rich knowledge base usually contains user manuals; troubleshooting information, how-to articles, tutorial videos, and answers to frequently asked questions. Once you have a strong knowledge base, you need to ensure that your customers know about it and engage with the content available.

2. Implementing Full-Text Search

Once your KB is up and live, you need to focus on improving the search to make content discovery easier. The out-of-box search module from Service Cloud is good, but at times, it might not return relevant search results. Since, every user coming to your support portal will be using search, you need to ensure that your search module is fast and highly accurate. To achieve this, one option is that you implement full-text search. Full-text search simplifies the search indexing process and gives relevant results to your users instantly. With better indexing and most querying tools like regex, fuzzy search, wildcards, you can make it easy to search all the items, including articles, products, documents, solutions, tasks, notes, events and different topics.

To create a full-text search service, you require a full-text catalog defined in the database plus a full-text search index defined on one of the tables in the database. There are some open source applications available for implementing this, but we would recommend Apache SOLR for Service Cloud.

3. Enabling Suggested Articles

You can enhance full-text search modules’ usability by enabling suggested articles. With this feature, you can offer “Google-like” search experience to your users. Whenever a new case is saved, the search engine automatically searches the articles that have common keywords in the case subject. When they have typed a part of the search term, this module can throw up-to 10 suggested articles. These are instrumental in enabling the customers to self-solve their queries and consequently, get your support costs down. In fact, you can even measure how much you have saved on your support costs by multiplying the numbers of case deflections by the cost per support case.

Savings in support costs = Numbers of case deflections * Cost per support case

4. Reporting and identifying deflected cases

You can run reports on the case fields to check how many cases have been deflected by your public knowledge base, and suggested articles.

To drill-down and identify deflected cases, you can add the Closed by Self-Service User field to your case page layouts. This Self-Service User field is automatically set by Salesforce and cannot be changed. If you are an administrator, you can modify and add the fields to your case page layout. You can also create a formula field on the case object that will include Closed When Created and Closed by Self-Service User. This delivers you with a unique field which tells whether the case has been closed or not.

When you implement the aforementioned tweaks in your Service Cloud instance, you would transform your Service Cloud into a preferred destination for your users to land onto whenever they have a query. For technical expertise or even have a word on how these features can work best for you, just drop a word at [email protected]

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