Unleashing the Customer Voice With Service Cloud

Originally posted at saleforce.com

Gone are the days companies can afford to think of customer service as a drain on resources and bottleneck to increasing sales. Now the most innovative companies have turned customer service centers into customer engagement hubs with more data and insight on customers than any marketing or sales departments. In today’s digital world, customer service is the command center of the customer voice.

Leading service organizations are using Service Cloud to unleash customer data across the organization to enable a frictionless customer experience. According to Bluewolf’s third annual State of Salesforce, Service Cloud is the fastest-growing and second most adopted Salesforce cloud.

As Service Cloud continues to transform how service centers are able to interact with the customer, there are a few key features that are driving a truly unique employee and customer experiences. Here are three features enabling service professionals to deliver a frictionless customer experience:

1. The Value of a Central Knowledge BaseWhen service agents have access to a quality knowledge base, they are empowered to meet customer expectations in a timely manner. With Knowledge, instead of training employees to memorize the answer, agents are empowered with access to the right answers in a timely manner. As Salesforce enhances the functionality of Knowledge, organizations are increasing their investment.  

• Bluewolf found that 4 out of 5 service departments invested in Salesforce Knowledge say they have the ability to better address customer needs. Tweet this.
  

2. Service Departments Lead the Investment in Community CloudSalesforce Community Cloud is transforming the way companies interact with customers—combining the power of sales, service, and marketing into a single system of engagement that drives collaboration between customers, partners, and employees. An investment in the Community Cloud will separate the average customer service department from leading service innovators that are truly prioritizing customer experience.

• According to Bluewolf, 30% of service departments are invested in Community Cloud; Bluewolf projects this number to double over the next year. Tweet this.
  

3. Channel Integration is Crucial to Customer Service SuccessThe right channel strategy is not to be accessible on every channel, but instead to focus on specific channels that will bring the most value to both your customers and your business. The integration of customer channels must be determined by where your customers are driving the conversation about your brand, not by the latest social fad or channel opportunity.

Bluewolf projects that an investment in integrating key service channels into Service Cloud will separate innovative customer engagement from traditional customer service. Success comes when an agent can look at a case not as a single one-time interaction, but rather part of a broader multi-channel ongoing conversation with a customer.

• 64% of service centers will have three or more customer channels integrated with Service Cloud within the next year, according to Bluewolf. Tweet this.
  

Want to learn about other key investments within Customer Service and the broader enterprise? Read the third annual State of Salesforce report, which outlines how the best companies are using Salesforce. Based on global data collected in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management, this annual review distills insight from more than 1,000 Salesforce customers.