Mastering Service Channels with Salesforce Service Cloud

The goal of the Salesforce Service Cloud is to provide service to all customers at anytime and anywhere. This is achieved with the help of Service agents at the Business Center to resolve the customer queries who should have all the information at their fingertips. Case is the building block of Salesforce Service Cloud. It represents a customer’s issue, question, support, or feedback which is then followed by a resolution process by the service agents. Besides, it stores all the customer information, query details and the different activities needed to solve the case. Building an efficient Case Management Process will not only strengthen the service agents, but additionally improve agent’s productivity, customer satisfaction and quick resolution of cases.

Introduction

Planning and executing an efficient Case Management Process is a vital process. These steps play a significant role in case management process – case creation, resolution and escalation of cases if required and case closure. Case Creation process starts with choosing the relevant service channels where the service agents are present to help their customer. To set up the cases, deciding the origin of the case is critical. Furthermore, one should keep in mind that while selecting the channels through which the customer could report, it is expected by customers that there are service agents available to guide them further if required. 

There are several aspects that should be considered during selection of the service channel such as company budget, sales volume, types of products, types of services sold, types of customers, the most common reasons for customers to contact you and the list may go on. Let us explore in further sections what are the different service channels available, and which can be best fitted for the respective business The following are the options to create customer requests into cases in Salesforce:

• Email-to-Case

• Web-to-Case

• Chat-to-Case

• Phone-to-Case

• Question-To-Case 

Email-to-Case

Salesforce provides the functionality to automatically create cases when customers send messages or queries to the email addresses that are specified by the business (usually a support email address). It can populate case information automatically saving the agent’s time and avoid data errors as well. Further, it can be used when there is more than one support email address which agents handle manually. There are two methods to setup Email-to-Case functionality. One can choose the relevant Email-to-Case functionality based on the business needs. 

Web-to-Case 

Customers can directly create a case from the company’s website with Salesforce Web-to-Case functionality. This helps the organizations to respond to customers faster and improves the service agent’s productivity. Along with this, it allows organizations to generate a web-to-case form which they can add to their company’s website that allows customers to easily create a case to address their queries. A simple basic web-to-case  form can look like this.

In the Web-to-Case Form, fields like name, phone and email are mandatory. Additional fields as required can be added. Moreover, a return URL i.e., where the page is redirected after the case is created through the Web-to-Case form can be added. The values entered in the Web-to-Case form are automatically populated onto the case fields as per mapping that saves agents efforts. Furthermore, before creating the case, it runs the validations and only creates the data with valid values or throws an error. Few limitations that should be kept in mind while choosing this channel is that it is limited to receive 5000 cases in a 24-hour period. The pending request queue has a limit of 50,000 combined requests. Further additional requests are rejected, and administrator receives email notifications. Besides, it does not support Attachments and Rich Text Area. It also does not perform any spam filtering of the Web-to-Case forms. These limitations should be reviewed by business before choosing this service channel.

Chat-to-Case

Quick resolution to customer is one of the crucial factors to keep the customer happy. It is estimated that customer chat can grow up to 87% in the next 12-18 months. Instant resolutions to customer query must be one of the factors when developing a support process. One of the solutions to that is to live chat with the customer and resolve the query instantly. This can be achieved by the Chat-to-Case functionality. A Support agent is involved to have a chat with the customer to address the query. This helps in having a personalized interaction with the customer that helps to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. Besides, Live Chat Salesforce provides a chat bot functionality, in case at any point in business there are no live agents to address the customer. The chat bot can answer the questions as per it is directed. This interaction can also be followed with a case creation process. Chat transcript and customer details are populated on the case record that can be helpful in tracking down the customer at any point in further time. Additionally, one can access customer details during the chat, send quick text messages in chat, attach articles or transcripts in chat and close a session.

Phone-to-Case

Gaining Customer Success is one of the crucial components in the Support process. In today’s modern world, where phone keeps us connected to everything, Phone calls are a prominent way for a customer to reach out to the business and get the query answered. Developing an efficient way for handling the phone calls in a support process plays a key role which can be achieved in Salesforce. Converting a phone call to a case helps the agent to get all the required information at a single place and resolve the cases faster. Salesforce CTI 
(Computer Telephony Integration) provides an essential link between phone and computer systems. 
This enables service agents to utilize features like transferring calls, placing on hold, muting conversations. More than that it displays all the customer information on few clicks like customer call recordings, billing information, call history and other information that is required to resolve the case. If starting with such a new system, then one more way to achieve this would be adding a phone to Salesforce on the screen. This saves money as you do not have to buy the equipment’s or individual phone lines for your service team. As well as Automation of few tasks, customizing greeting messages becomes an effortless task. Add on with this you can create cases that are linked to this call log or contact or account present in the salesforce ecosystem.

Question-to-Case

Chatter Questions allows customers to ask questions in the community feed and in your Salesforce organization. Another unique way to create cases is provided with the Question-to-Case functionality. This creates a case from an escalated unanswered customer question or query to give them priority. Question-to-Case is available in communities where Chatter Question is enabled. that allows customers to easily create a case to address their queries. A simple basic web-to-case form can look like this.

If a question in Chatter is not resolved, moderators can escalate the question to a case directly in the feed. When a customer’s question is turned into a case, the customer receives an email with the case number and a link to the case. When agents find a solution, they can respond to questions directly from the case, and the customer sees the agent’s response to the question. Agents can choose whether the reply is visible to the community or only to the customer who asked the question.

Social Media Enablement

Customers are reaching out to businesses across multiple social media channels like Facebook,  YouTube, and Twitter. Instead of assigning someone from the team specifically to reach out to customers, you can turn your customers’ interactions into cases in Salesforce. This results in saving time and letting your email and social media interactions come to your team where they already are in Salesforce. Gathering customers’ questions in one place lets you and your team manage your open tasks more efficiently and make sure that every customer is heard. Social Customer Service automatically creates cases for social media mentions, posts or direct  messages from your company’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram pages. Salesforce Essentials comes with the Social Customer Service Starter Pack, with which you can select any two engagement channels from this pack (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Instagram). When you are working on cases from your support email address, you can insert email templates, add attachments, and send your response right from the case. No more hopping between business email and the case list. On top of that one can like, unlike, view source, and delete social media posts from the case feed in Salesforce itself.

Conclusion

Based on the advantages and disadvantages of each service channel, businesses can choose their efficient way to handle creation of cases and ensure the service agents are available in the respective channel. Figure 7 illustrates which chann can be most suitable for business needs. This decision helps in handling customer cases efficiently, thereby increasing customer satisfac-tion, loyalty and brand value.