Provide a Choice of Service Channels
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the benefit of Omni-Channel case routing.
- Show why self-service improves the customer experience.
- Explain the difference between assisted case routing and automated case routing.
Customers Want Choice
We know that Salesforce only succeeds if our customers do. That’s why we strive to deliver the best customer service for every customer—and why we use Service Cloud to do it. We call our contact center the Success Center and we named it that because it’s focused on the success of our customers. This module shows you how we scaled our contact center on our journey of rapid growth. We share the lessons we learned along the way and explore best practices that you can implement in your own company. In this first unit, you get an overview of our customer portal and case routing.
The Importance of Self-Service
Our customer portal is built with Experience Cloud sites. We're utilizing both Chat and telephone.. Unassisted channels—those without agent support—are available to our customers using Knowledge, Experience Cloud, and our Einstein Bots. Recently, our Success Center has seen a sharp increase in self-service as a preferred channel. Our internal research shows that 51% of our customers use unassisted channels (self-service), as compared to 49% using assisted (with an agent). The trend toward unassisted self-service options shows that customers really want to get the help they need anytime of the day. It’s important to provide self-service options to keep customers happy.
How Assisted Case Routing Works
With assisted case routing, customers are given options that help route cases to specific skill groups. When customers go to the Service Cloud portal, they see several different options. Customers select the topic and category from a dropdown menu. When creating a support ticket, our help portal prompts customers to describe their skill level with Salesforce. We give them three choices from a dropdown menu, “I am a beginner,” “I know my way around,” or “I am expert or power user.”
We’re lucky at Salesforce to have customers who have been with us for 20 years, which amounts to a lot of knowledge and experience. So we offer customers a choice of connecting to a highly experienced agent.
Here’s our four-step process for assisted case routing:
- Customer selects topic and category.
- Knowledge recommendations are made.
- Customer provides level of expertise.
- Case routed to appropriate skills group.
What we're trying to do with these options is to give the customer the ability to describe their level of expertise so the case is routed to the appropriate skill group, helping to reduce case resolution time.
Get Automated, Targeted Case Routing with Omni-Channel
In a traditional contact center, managers are often tasked with dispatching cases, manually routing them to the right skill group. This can create an additional workload for your managers, leaving them less time to focus on their teams and ultimately, their customers. Using Omni-Channel can free up your managers’ time and helps resolve cases much more easily. In our success center, Omni-Channel automates the assignment of cases, routes to agents based on skill and capacity, and provides real-time operational intelligence about agents and queues—all of which improves productivity.
As they move through their workday, agents can select if they're available for cases or not right from their console. The supervisor console provides a view of each agent in real time to ensure everything runs smoothly. Managers are able to quickly see the support requests in queues at all times, who's unavailable to help, what agent backlogs are looking like, and how many cases they've gotten per day. We find that using Omni-Channel allows managers to more fully understand their team’s capacity and ensure cases get to the right team at the right time.
Conclusion
Many customers prefer to try and resolve questions with self-service before reaching out to an agent. When they do need help from an agent, it’s important to use both assisted and automated case routing to reduce case resolution time and provide a good customer experience. In the next unit, you learn how self-service options can help your business scale, even during periods of rapid growth.