Meet Consumer Goods Cloud for Service
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the challenges faced by service agents and customers during service interactions.
- Outline the features of Consumer Goods (CG) Cloud for Service.
- Explain why the Timeline component is important.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, consider completing the following recommended content.
Challenges During Service Interactions
Have you ever contacted a service center with a query or grievance, or to place an order for a product or service? Sometimes, these interactions are challenging. Imagine that a customer contacts a manufacturer’s call center to find out product details. However, the service representative can’t find the answers. As a result, the call ends with a dissatisfied customer. This experience is common with the conventional service center approach.
When customers need support, they expect service agents to answer their questions and help solve their problems. However, traditional service centers may fail to do either, for various reasons.
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Disconnected channels: Communication gaps between customers and service agents make it difficult for customers to express their needs clearly, while agents struggle to provide effective solutions.
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Case backlog: Service departments accumulate unresolved customer inquiries, complaints, and technical issues leading to delays in response times.
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Unavailability of data: Software and server issues, damaged hardware, and network outages hamper agents from accessing data crucial for service calls.
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Lack of training: Service agents without adequate training lack the necessary skills and knowledge to effectively resolve issues, leading to customer frustration and unmet needs.
Service can start even before a customer buys a product. As soon as the customer asks a question, the service process begins. Yet service agents have notoriously difficult jobs. Not only must they address customer concerns promptly and with grace, they often have to work with incomplete and disconnected customer and product data. Add to these outdated systems and applications, and you have a recipe for dissatisfied customers and unhappy service agents. Customer satisfaction is vital for retailers and manufacturers, and their success depends on the efficiency and productivity of service agents. Here’s where Consumer Goods (CG) Cloud for Service comes into the picture.
Elevate Service Excellence
These days, businesses must shift their strategy and transform service departments from cost centers to profit centers. Each and every customer interaction provides valuable insights into their preferences and pain points. Acquiring this intelligence is the only way to optimize customer satisfaction and maximize sales.
Fatima is a Salesforce admin for Alpine Group, a consumer goods company that manufactures food products and beverages for health-conscious people.
Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), a chain of stores across the USA, is a major customer account of Alpine Group. To increase the productivity and efficiency of the NTO service team, Fatima is eager to explore the capabilities of the Consumer Goods Cloud for Service app.
Explore Consumer Goods Cloud for Service
CG Cloud for Service is built on Salesforce Service Cloud. It provides an app for service agents to work more efficiently and increase customer satisfaction.
With CG Cloud for Service, you create and configure the app, which is tailored to address the many challenges faced by service departments. An integral part of the app, the service console for CG Cloud gives service agents a single source of truth for swiftly resolving customer issues and answering questions.
Here’s an image of the app that shows details for NTO Store #201.
Take a look at the key features.
Action Launcher
Service agents use Action Launcher to easily search for and launch actions from the service console. The predefined actions include routine tasks like scheduling visits, escalating cases, and creating orders. This saves time and effort so service agents can focus on higher-value jobs, such as crisis management and feedback collection. Plus, you can customize these actions to suit a variety of business needs.
Access to Customer Information
With the app, service agents get a 360-degree view of the customer. They can also easily see store and manager details. A customer profile card displays information like store name, image, contact number, address, and email address.
Identity Verification
With identity verification, service agents ensure the correct identity of each and every customer, store manager, or any other authorized representative they need to interact with. Authentication of a caller’s identity involves them answering security questions associated with their profile in the database.
Engagement Interactions
When a customer contacts the business with a query, service agents create an engagement interaction using the CG Cloud for Service app. Initiated by an inbound or outbound call, the interaction can take place over voice or video, through web chat, or through an in-person meeting. Channels like Open Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and Omni-Channel enable service agents to manage these calls.
Omni-Channel
Service agents use the Omni-Channel capability of Salesforce to create engagement interactions with the customers. When customers initiate a chat, voice, or messaging conversation, an Omni-Channel flow launches to route the work item to a queue, skill set, agent, or bot. This feature saves the service team’s time and effort by automatically routing the work items based on the service agent status. For more information, see How Does an Omni-Channel Flow Work?
Advanced Orders
With minimal clicks and scrolling, service agents can quickly create and edit orders with accurate prices. They can calculate order prices using simple pricing and penny perfect pricing features. Penny perfect pricing is a capability that ensures order prices are accurate to the penny. Learn more about it later in the module.
Timeline
Service agents need visibility of all customer interactions along with when the interactions take place. To this end, they use the in-app Timeline feature to track key customer events and conversations over time. Custom timelines give users a comprehensive, chronological, and interactive view of customer-related activities, all in a single place. Plus, service agents can create engagement interactions, visits, advanced orders, and cases through the Timeline component.
Salesforce Knowledge
Sometimes, service agents need to search for a relevant topic to answer a customer query. This is when the Knowledge component comes in handy. They use Salesforce Knowledge to quickly access relevant and frequently used articles to give accurate, comprehensive answers to customers.
All these features—Action Launcher, centralized customer data, identity verification, and more—work together to provide a smooth service agent and customer experience.
The Timeline Component
The Timeline component is an important feature of the service console for CG Cloud. A preconfigured Timeline displays events that service agents create while interacting with the customers.
CG Cloud for Service comes with a default timeline already set up for Advanced Orders, Visits, and Engagement Interaction entities. You can also create a new timeline and customize it as needed. Configure it by adding related objects like advanced orders, cases, visits, and engagement interactions through Add Related Object. Be sure to activate the timeline to make it available for use.
Fatima, the Salesforce Admin at Alpine Group, is now equipped with a good understanding of the key features in CG Cloud for Service. She’s ready to get the handy Service App up and running for all the busy service agents at Alpine Group.
Move on to the next unit to get hands on with CG Cloud for Service.