Streamline Customer Service with Automation
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how automation makes your entire service team more efficient and your customers happier.
- Describe how to map business problems to automation solutions.
- List Service Cloud features you can use to automate service tasks.
What’s Automation for Service?
Customer service is about providing a smooth and simple journey that meets each customer’s needs. It often takes many steps, agents, and systems to complete that journey. Automation helps to streamline the process.
For example, what if you could automate a repetitive task, like entering customer details only once and having them show up wherever they’re needed across the company? This process saves time for the customer and service team while ensuring accuracy. Likewise, automating complex processes across your entire business ensures that your team has the tools they need when customers are sent to the next stage in their journey.
Here’s a quick video overview of the service experience. While you watch it, think about how this service journey is automated and ways you could adapt it to your business.
Improve Customer Service with Automation
Let’s see how you can implement automation to solve common service scenarios.
Business Challenge | Solution | Result |
|---|---|---|
Agents don’t have access to the data they need to help customers. | Create a 360-degree view of the customer that’s shared across teams and integrated from any third-party system. | Increased customer satisfaction and faster average handle time for calls. |
Complicated business processes are hard to coordinate across teams. | Use workflows and real-time collaboration tools to connect teams so they can swarm more efficiently and resolve issues faster. | Faster resolution of complicated cases. |
Agents struggle to manage a high volume of cases. | Use AI to triage cases with machine learning, assist agents with actionable insights, and move the process forward with recommendations. | Increase agent productivity and first-call resolution. |
Customers don't have convenient options to resolve issues on their own. | Create a workflow once and embed it in self-service portals or surface it in chat and messaging channels via a chatbot so customers can self-serve. | Scale your support by deflecting cases and lowering the cost to serve each customer. |
Your company has had a few big service disruptions and customers didn’t get the latest information and support they needed. | Set up Incident Management to track disruptions and delegate tasks to the right experts in a crisis. | Turn disruptions into a positive experience where customers feel supported and build loyalty. |
Features You Can Use to Automate Customer Service
Here’s a snapshot of a few features that help service teams automate processes to improve the customer service experience.
- Salesforce: Use this platform to meet your customers on every channel. It provides a single source of truth for customer data that is available throughout your organization.
- Data from Anywhere: Use Salesforce Connect to integrate data from multiple sources. Mulesoft Anypoint Platform’s powerful APIs connect data sources programmatically. MuleSoft Composer’s library of connectors and templates connect data sources without code.
- Salesforce Flow and Flow Builder: Create automated flows to guide agents using drag-and-drop builders that contain out-of-the-box templates and reusable building blocks.
- Einstein for Service: Work smarter with Salesforce’s powerful AI. Einstein Case Classification pre-fills case fields for agents to review. Einstein Case Routing sends cases to the best agent or queue. Einstein Article Recommendations suggests the most relevant knowledge article to agents working on cases. Einstein Next Best Action provides contextual, real-time recommendations. Einstein Bots automates common questions or processes and collects case details for a seamless agent handoff. Check out this quick look for more great ways to use Einstein to solve your thorniest problems.
- Incident Management: Fix service disruptions and communicate resolutions quickly to everyone who needs to know.
Now that you’ve seen how to improve each customer’s journey while increasing your efficiency, are you ready to get started with Service Cloud automation?
Resources
- Salesforce blog post: 4 Must-Have Capabilities for Customer Service Automation
- Salesforce blog post: Start Your Customer Service Automation Process with These 5 Questions
- Salesforce blog post: Before You Automate, Create a Customer Service Process Map – Here’s How
- Salesforce blog post: You’ve Automated Your Customer Service Process – What’s Next?