Learn About the Salesforce Platform Advantage

Learning Objectives

After completing this module, you’ll be able to:

• Explain why connecting sales and service will help you retain customers.
• Describe how companies can use Sales Cloud and Service Cloud together to better serve customers.
• Explain the Salesforce Platform advantage.

Sales + Service = Happy Customers

Until now, sales and service have been working in silos. They’re separate parts of an organization, each with their own distinct jobs, goals, and customer experiences. The conventional wisdom is:

1. Sales brings in new customers.
2. Service helps retain customers by solving their problems.
3. Never the twain shall meet (except maybe for lunch!).

However, (and this is key) today’s connected customers are anything but conventional. They expect to have an amazing customer experience every single time they interact with your company. And research shows that if they don’t, they won’t hang around to see your next product launch—and that’s no way to grow a brand.

Customer Retention Is Everybody’s Job

We all appreciate the important role of sales teams: to court new customers. But what many companies don’t realize is that retaining customers is just as critical for sustaining growth. Happy customers come back again and again. And they turn into loyal brand ambassadors who bring in even more new customers.

That’s why your service team is no longer just a break-fix operation, it’s now a customer experience operation. Your service team is sitting on the frontlines of customer success, working to keep current customers from becoming ex-customers.

Customer Retention—the Bottom Line According to research by Bain & Company, the ability or inability to keep customers makes a huge difference. A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25%—to a whopping 95%.

Keeping Your Sales and Service Teams Separate Can Cost You

We’ve already said that today’s customers are ultra-connected, and they expect the companies they deal with to be available via any device or channel, too. So what’s a leading reason companies aren’t retaining customers? Fragmented communication between teams that results in disjointed service.

Fun fact:

According to the 2017 State of Service Research Report, 78% of business buyers say they are extremely likely or very likely to switch brands if they receive inconsistent levels of service.

In other words, if sales and service aren’t aligned to provide a steady service experience, expect to start hemorrhaging customers. This means a loss of revenue and the added expenditures of acquiring new customers to replace the ones who have left.

Break Down the Silos

If you want to keep customers happy in today’s connected world, you have to break down the walls between teams. Provide both sales and service organizations with the tools they need to efficiently address every customer concern from first purchase and beyond.

Sales departments require a view into their service departments in order to glean new customer insights. And service agents need information, such as transactional history, so they can answer customer questions about every sale. These connections work to make the customer’s experience as easy and seamless as possible.

Think of it this way: sending a service rep into a customer call without the corresponding information regarding their sale is like playing pin the tail on the donkey. You’re trying to hit the sweet spot with a blindfold on. If agents don’t have the full customer picture, they end up guessing at customer needs. And that only frustrates your customers and your agents.

Meet the Salesforce Platform Advantage

Many companies already experience the pitfalls of keeping sales and service in departmental silos. That’s why bringing sales and service together seems like a natural next step. And progressive companies are looking to align their organizations and software to let them do just that. But making this happen seamlessly hasn’t been simple. Sales and service solutions are often built separately, and bringing them together can be extremely complicated, costly, and oftentimes inefficient.

So what’s the solution? Enter the Salesforce Platform. Service Cloud and Sales Cloud are built on Salesforce’s number one customer success platform. It’s the secret sauce that enables seamless integration between your sales and service organizations with no complicated, costly deployments.

With the Salesforce Platform Advantage everyone in your sales and service organizations has a 360-degree view of every customer and their interactions with your company. And with this knowledge, your company gains the competitive advantage of delivering faster, smarter, more personalized service.

How a 360-Degree Customer View Can Help You Create Happier Customers and a Higher ROI

• Your service agents are smarter —Agents can see a customer’s complete history when they call. And not just the service story, but what products and services they’ve purchased and how long they’ve been a customer. There’s no more asking customers to repeat the same information. For example, let’s say the item you purchased yesterday just went on sale, and the price dropped to below what you paid so you call in to ask about the new price. The agent you speak to can easily look at your purchase history and proactively offer you a price adjustment, without you having to go through the laborious process of explaining your entire situation. In this way, customers get a more personalized and positive experience—and agent productivity soars.
• Your sales team is empowered —With customer insights available to everyone across your organization, your sales and service relationship doesn’t just consist of handoffs. For example, if a sales rep sees the case history of a customer who was unhappy with a product, that rep can personalize future sales by offering a discount on a future deal or offering a product that better suits the customer’s needs based on their feedback.
• Your business grows faster—Closing deals isn’t just for sales teams. Now service agents can be empowered to not only seamlessly pass along leads, but make sales of their own. Your entire organization can win potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities via the service agent—all without ever leaving their service console.

  See the Value of the Service Cloud Platform Quantify the value of implementing Service Cloud across your contact center. From reduced case resolution time to increased customer upsell, and new efficiencies, your bottom line will most certainly benefit. Quantify Your Business Benefit Using Our ROI Calculator

Stay Ahead of the Competition with the Salesforce Platform

As customers become more and more connected, the technological demands on your business are constantly growing. But those pressures don’t have to slow your business. With one platform, sales and service can tap into customer insights anytime—regardless of how technology evolves. The Salesforce Platform lets companies have all customer data together in one place. This means companies can take full advantage of wherever the next generation of technology takes your customers and business. And that’s not just true for sales and service, but for marketing, analytics, self-service sites, commerce—and more.

Resources

Increase Revenue with Connected Sales and Service

Putting the Salesforce Platform to the Test: The Core Health and Fitness Story

Fitness equipment supplier Core Health and Fitness centers its entire business around customers. Unfortunately, when it came to customer support, the sales and service processes were completely separate. And this is what it looked like: Sales teams walked into situations in which customers had unresolved service issues, or they visited customers to solve problems that didn’t actually exist. And because they didn’t have visibility into a customer’s complete history, the teams were losing out on cross-sell opportunities.

Then Core Health and Fitness turned to Salesforce to implement a custom, unified platform in order to measure specific outcomes across both lines of business. Now service agents and the sales teams can see a customer’s complete history, so that they can tie cases and opportunities together, and act on them quickly.

The alignment also made it easy for the company to establish more effective service-level agreements (SLAs) with automated emails for real-time feedback and faster case resolution.

By the Numbers—How the Salesforce Platform  Boosted Customer Satisfaction Now Core Health and Fitness customers say that the service is massively improved. In fact, many tell them that they feel it’s the best they’ve seen. Gained 80% Improvement  In SLA case resolution Boosted Customer Satisfaction Big Time with a (CSAT) score of 4.75 (out of 5)