How Salesforce Communities Can Improve Your Customer Service - Live from #DF16

“If your Self Service goal is to deflect customers to a cheaper channel – you’re missing the bigger opportunity – to engage.” Gene Koopman, Technical Services Director at Bluewolf, and Bob Furniss, Customer Care Practice Director at Bluewolf, led our Dreamforce session on “Connecting the Dots in Customer Service with Communities” earlier today.

Customer service is no longer confined to call centers, requiring companies to implement better tools to improve experiences and outcomes. Customizing communities for service cloud allows you to capitalize on emerging needs and opportunities, reduce risk and increase efficiencies. In order to achieve this, customer service and marketing must align, collecting a multitude of information and customer data to market and engage with customers more effectively.

We’ve identified five areas of focus that will move you to the next level in customer service:

• Omni-channel: The goal for omni-channel is simple yet profound - consistency of service across all channels and accessible anywhere.
• Self Service: It’s not a destination, but a location where service lives in the digital world including websites, portals and communities.
• Knowledge: To enable your agents to answer questions quickly and efficiently.
• Social Service: Engage with your customers and provide them answers in real time, on the channels they choose to engage on most.
• Cognitive/ AI: “If you don’t have cognitive service tools on your roadmap, you at least need to be learning about what they are,” Furniss stated.

The reality of service today is that mobile has given us access everywhere. Companies often look to “deflect” their customers from one channel to an easier or cheaper channel for them to manage. Furniss commented “it’s not about deflecting your customers, it’s about engaging them.” For example, text is usually a channel that companies will use to inform but not engage. If your text says “do not reply” on the bottom when you send it to a customer, you are opening a channel and effectively underutilizing it by discouraging your customers from replying back and engaging with you.

Community Cloud has offered the opportunity to better connect with their customers across channels in big ways. Koopman shared the story of the Midwest Operating Engineer’s Union (MOE).

The goal fro MOE was to allow their members to view more options, have better transparency into their pensions, and increase the speed with which they could get this information. With a custom UI and UX. Bluewolf provided ready-to-access content and case management that allowed users to intuitively manage issues on their own but quickly reach an agent when needed.

The results of this were a tremendous take rate and lowered number of questions. On the road map is tier 1 support for open enrollment with Live Agent support. 

What's next for Salesforce Lightning, Communities, and Cognitive?

Service cloud is moving towards more digital experiences like the one built for MOE. The focus is all about the interaction with the customer and the continuation of service console’s ability to provide the agent the right information at the right time. 

A big piece of being able to be in the “right place at the right time” is understanding: how do we harness this massive data source housed in CRM and use it so it's not just noise? And that's the experience you should have when you log in to communities. That means logging in and things being ready for where you are as a customer, whether that’s specific to where you are in a sales cycle or where you are geographically etc.

The future for Lightning is that in a couple of years, we are going to be able to build a solution that is a total tailored community experience with just a few components on the Lightning framework.

In summary, there are exciting things coming to Salesforce, but the future is now. You have customer data and there are ways to use it to create a smoother, faster experience for your users on Community Cloud. Talk to us in the main expo hall at booth 1205 or in the Service Lodge to learn how.