Empowering your customer support team

‘The customer is king’ is one of many sayings often paraphrased in everyday business, but the importance of the customer to any business really cannot be underestimated.

At the end of the day, not even the best products and services sell themselves. In todays’ world, customer relationship management (CRM) takes more than just a solid technology, it requires knowledgeable staff and the right organisational culture. However, introducing a world class technology platform will take an organisations customer service to another level, by radically improving both efficiency and quality of service.

Taking into consideration a CRM platform, which incorporates an online knowledge sharing site, collecting FAQ’s in a way which is both accessible as well as searchable will not only enable your customers to help themselves, but also allows support agents to easily find solutions used by other agents when dealing with similar past queries. An online knowledgebase backed up by a CRM platform will contribute greatly to tracking and resolving customer issues more efficiently and effectively.

Managing your support teams work assignments is no mean feat. Using omni channel routing features, tasks and customer queries can be assigned to your support team intelligently. Work can be automatically routed based on workloads and agents skills (for example language). Omni channel can provide various entry points for customer requests, whether social media, web, email or even phone. This can provide a consistent customer experience over every channel for your organisation. It will also deliver real time analytics and KPI’s to the support managers, even across multiple service teams.

On top of this, having an optimised service console for service agents built according to their needs can also improve efficiency figures. Apart from simplifying the experience for an agent, this will also have a positive effect on the customers’ experience, as agents will have access to a 360° view of each customer at their fingertips.

When talking CRM, one cannot shy away from the conversation on reporting and analytics. Having a platform with reporting and analytics intrinsically built-in is imperative. Whether tracking the lifetime of a service request, or reporting on customer information, a CRM platform must give organisations the ability to create the necessary reports and dashboards required to drive decision-making.

Bringing Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the game will raise the organisations bar even higher, especially in customer service. With the help of AI, organisations will begin to understand their customers in new ways, based on their past behaviours. AI will also assist agents in anticipating their customers by predicting factors such as likelihood of conversion, whilst also predicting which articles or replies will help close particular cases. AI will give organisations the ability to direct customers to the product information they are actually looking for as well as guiding agents into upselling or cross-selling. Taking AI a step further, AI chatbot’s can address your mainstream support cases with minimal agent interaction.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a service platform for your organisation’s customer service and support team. It provides features like case tracking and social networking plug-in for conversation and analytics with 360° view of every customer. This not only helps your agents solve customer problems faster, but also gives your customers access to answers which can help them solve problems on their own. It also gives better visibility of the customer touch points to the business, allowing for better and faster decision making.

Deloitte Digital

Deloitte Digital and Salesforce can redefine your connection with customers, suppliers and partners, to inspire engagement, preference and brand loyalty. Our network of member firms work with forwardthinking companies to reimagine and build solutions across every step of the customer journey.

Andrea Muscat is a Senior Consultant with Deloitte Malta Consulting. For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com/mt/salesforce