Connect Customer Service

Learning Objectives

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

• Explain the value of unifying commerce and service.
  
• Explain the importance of world-class customer service in today's retail environment.
  
• List the tools that agents can use to become customer service rock stars.
  

Customer Loyalty

Winning customer loyalty is difficult. Consumers are inundated with new brands, new promotions, new styles, and new influencers—across every device and digital property. Shoppers can easily pick, try, and abandon brands. In business terms, “switching costs” are usually low for consumers. Customer service is paramount to keeping shoppers happy, encouraging repeat visits, and creating loyal brand advocates.

Service leaders have a lot to juggle: reducing costs while increasing customer satisfaction, the inconveniences of supporting multiple, siloed systems while trying to improve the agent experience, and balancing operational excellence with service innovation. Now service centers are also becoming sales channels—adding opportunity, but also additional demands on agents and service leaders.

Connected Customer Service

The job of service agents is to make customers happy. When agents have to manage different interfaces, and rectify data—like customer profiles, order history, and case history—in real time across different systems, the customer experience suffers. Customer service agents need a complete view of the customer across ecommerce and the customer service app. Any update made in ecommerce or service should flow seamlessly between the two applications, enabling agents to cross and upsell with:

• A full view of the product catalog
  
• Product recommendations
  
• The ability to “order on behalf of” customers, adding recommended items to their online basket or even completing an authorized transaction for them
  

Turn Customer Service into a Selling Channel

Customer service doesn’t have to be reactive. Agents can turn service interactions into cross-selling and upselling opportunities through connected service and commerce. With Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud, agents can easily co-browse with shoppers, view carts in real time, and add products to a shopper’s cart. From there, agents can complete the transaction for the shopper, or the shopper can complete the transaction themselves. This is useful in multiple scenarios.

• When shoppers call with an expired coupon, an agent can apply an override discount to the cart.
  
• When shoppers need an item recommended, an agent can locate and add it to the cart to accelerate the checkout process.
  
• When shoppers have difficulty closing a transaction, an agent can help complete it. Take a look at the Order on Behalf Solution Kit to learn how to implement this (English only).
  

Online Chat and Video Service

Service can now be embedded throughout the shopper experience so that agents reach customers when and where they need help. Whether a shopper needs online chat through the website or mobile app, two-way video chat via a mobile app, or multilingual support around the globe, connected commerce and service means that agents can be ready, accessible, and empowered with the data they need to help customers at every step. Take a look at the Conversational Commerce Solution Kit to learn how you can implement live chat (English only).

Social Listening and Response

In today’s digital world, people often take issues to Twitter before engaging with customer service. Just take a look at your Twitter feed. It’s peppered with complaints about airline delays, criticism because an order didn’t show up on time, or frustration with poor consumer experience.

Forty-two percent of service interactions are digital, and this number is growing. So we know it’s hard to deliver consistent service and engage with customers over every channel. To solve customer problems proactively, service agents have to get ahead of these grievances on the appropriate channels.

The trick is to listen and respond to customers across all social platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. By combining Service Cloud with Sprout Social, agents can apply keywords, classifiers, and language detection to ensure posts address issues in a timely way and switch continuously between channels managed through a single console.

Because social customer service is an integrated part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, each agent has a comprehensive picture of the customer and the situation before responding.

Self-Service Digital Sites

Maximize agent productivity. With a knowledge base that’s embedded directly in the console, agents can deliver the right answers to customers with ease. They can even share articles to any channel or device with one click. In retail, that can mean information about sizing or styling. Help customers help themselves.

Now your knowledge base will be integrated into your service website with secure customer portals, public sites, and public customer digital sites, creating an effortless customer experience through any device.

With tools that streamline processes and make customer information always accurate and accessible, agents can focus on the customer—and cultivate a repeat buyer and brand advocate.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Order on Behalf Solution Kit (English only)
• Salesforce Help: Conversational Commerce Solution Kit (English only)