Orchestrate the End-to-End Service Lifecycle
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how service reps can use the Service Console for Manufacturing to deliver delightful service interactions.
- Explain how service reps can track the warranties of different assets with Warranty Management.
- Discuss the use of Advanced Account Forecasting to forecast service revenue and spare parts.
- Relate how service managers can create personalized, branded surveys.
Transform the Service Experience
Najma wants a solution that solves her service team's challenges, fast. But first, Cindy needs to know how they work.
Rayler Parts started out with just a sales business unit. When sales of the new diesel and alternative-fueled generator product line shot up, so did support cases. The executives at Rayler Parts soon realized the need for an in-house service team to help build long-term customer loyalty and trust.
Today, the service unit mainly includes CSRs. They resolve customer cases logged from Rayler Parts’s website and also handle inbound calls. Some CSRs manage product warranty claims from customers. Moreover, Najma and service managers need to manage the inventory of spare parts for customer product maintenance.
Now that Cindy knows about the service business unit, she introduces Manufacturing Cloud for Service to Najma. It’s built on Service Cloud and offers several features for orchestrating the end-to-end service journey.
- Service Console for Manufacturing gives service reps a comprehensive picture of customer activity and tools for delivering delightful, meaningful service.
- Warranty Lifecycle Management helps warranty managers administer product warranties and simplifies claim settlement for warranty adjudicators.
- Advanced Account Forecasting helps account managers build and manage granular and accurate forecasts to monitor spare parts.
- Salesforce Surveys helps agents gather feedback from customers and partners with surveys that are easily integrated with web chat, calls, and case management.
- Declarative tools in the Flow for Manufacturing toolkit help admins build, automate, and run workflow processes, set up rules, and create branded, personalized customer journeys.
Let’s see how each feature helps the service team.
Use the Service Rep’s Toolbox
A typical CSR juggles a ton of tasks every day, including inbound customer calls and case assignments. When a customer phones, CSRs often struggle to find their details and take prompt action to resolve problems. They end up misunderstanding customer issues, asking repetitive questions, incorrectly addressing the customer, and misplacing key details.
On a bad day, customer service can turn into a minefield of errors. A small misstep can leave customers peeved about the company and hit customer satisfaction and retention scores.
Cindy knows exactly how the Service Console for Manufacturing can help service reps. Here’s the Service Console for Manufacturing.
The Service Console for Manufacturing gives CSRs 360-degree visibility into a customer’s activities and combines the tools needed to proactively resolve their queries.
When a customer calls the Rayler Parts service center, a CSR can:
- Verify their identity and pull up their information.
- View a timeline of interactions with the customer.
- Dive into the customer’s orders, cases, and assets.
- Receive alerts about key customer activities, like upcoming service contract renewals.
- Launch relevant actions to resolve the request, like scheduling a service appointment.
- Quickly find and open knowledge articles to answer questions.
The console supercharges CSR productivity, reduces time spent on each call, and helps Rayler Parts strengthen relationships with its customers. And that’s not all. Cindy can customize the individual components of the console to Raylers’s unique needs and use them with different standard apps.
Najma is impressed and confident the console will help deliver personalized, memorable service interactions at scale.
To learn more about the console, see Service Console for Manufacturing Cloud Admin Essentials.
Manage Warranties and Claims
Najma turns to another finding from the survey. Currently, Rayler Parts stores details about warranty terms, entitlements, and products on separate spreadsheets. For CSRs, finding the desired warranty information in all these sheets is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Najma asks Cindy if there’s a better way to manage warranties.
Cindy turns to her notes on Warranty Lifecycle Management. Warranty administrators can define thorough warranty terms, with entitlements such as covered labor, parts, and expenses. Here’s an example Warranty Term record.
Warranty administrators can associate products and assets with warranty terms and define conditions, extensions, and void terms. They can also extend or restrict warranty coverage by defining product-, defect-, or entitlement-based conditions of eligibility.
Partners and distributors can easily submit warranty claims with key details such as defective assets, causal parts, replaced parts, and labor charges. Warranty claims adjudicators can adjudicate claims by investigating defective assets, checking existing warranty coverages, and determining claim expenses—all from a single page. Here’s the Claim Items tab on the Claims record page.
Warranty administrators can also build robust claims adjudication processes using process-automation tools to reduce turnaround times and elevate claims adjudicator productivity.
To learn more, see Warranty Administration and Claims Management in Manufacturing Cloud.
Forecast Spare Parts and Service Revenue
When a customer product needs maintenance or repair, the Rayler Parts service center must procure the parts. Because the components aren’t part of a finished product, they must be purchased separately. It’s hard to plan for spare parts inventory due to the intermittent and sometimes volatile demand. Inaccurate estimations of demand cause overstocked or understocked inventories. Najma seeks a better way to project the need for spare parts.
It’s her lucky day. Cindy reintroduces a powerful feature you learned about earlier: Advanced Account Forecasting. Najma can create advanced account forecasts for the demand of spare parts. All Cindy has to do is customize a Data Processing Engine definition to create demand forecasts based on historical orders. With accurate forecasts, Najma can plan inventory more efficiently, minimize resource wastage, reduce replenishment periods, and lower inventory costs.
Hear the Voice of Your Customers
Najma has one last topic to discuss: a new customer satisfaction initiative that the service team plans to launch soon. They aim to reach out and gauge how customers perceive Rayler Parts’ service, identify areas for improvement, and double down on the things they’re doing well. However, Najma can’t seem to find the right tool to collect feedback and ensure high response rates.
Salesforce Surveys give Najma personalized, engaging surveys. Here’s an example survey in the Survey Builder.
With Salesforce Surveys, Najma has an intuitive editor for creating dynamic, branded surveys. Plus, she can automate survey distribution with personalized email invitations and track customer satisfaction metrics at each stage in the customer journey.
Najma is stoked to try and make a survey herself! To learn more, see Develop a Voice of the Customer.
Continue to the next unit to discover how Manufacturing Cloud can help Rayler Parts forge deeper ties with their partners.