5 Ways Salesforce Service Cloud Benefits Professional Services Companies

As you aim to deliver the best possible customer experience, you aim to keep customer interactions efficient, productive, and pleasant. Customers appreciate being known and understood by their provider of professional services without repeating themselves or explaining detail of their case to several of your team members. Just as important, your employees working with customers want to be successful in helping customers, so you need to empower them to do their best work.

When you deploy Salesforce, you can take advantage of the Service Cloud, one of its core components, to drive customer satisfaction and enable agents to be effective. In this blog post, we take a closer look at five Service Cloud capabilities that can make a huge difference for customers and agents of professional services firms. Your Sikich Salesforce and professional services experts can help you implement the technology and configure it so you can rapidly see the benefits of the functionalities we discuss here.

End-to-end case management enables consistently outstanding service

The case management features of Service Cloud help customer-facing employees deliver top-quality support efficiently, at every touchpoint, all the time. On their screens, agents see all relevant information about customers and their cases. They can assist customers in a competent manner, even if they’ve never met them before. Even in a single interaction, they can build trust and confidence that strengthen your firm’s customer relationships.

To serve customers consistently and efficiently, and to make employees’ lives easier, you can automate case management workflows using low-code and no-code steps that come naturally to users familiar with the business—especially if Sikich has shown them what they can do. In an agent’s workspace, you can present the right sequence of next steps given the customer’s needs, even along with guidance for specific actions or how to obtain assistance.

During customer interactions, agents can use on-screen flags to solicit assistance from a subject-matter expert or manager. Managers can also message an agent with information or guidance as they monitor a conversation. Automated alerts can prompt them to respond to changing customer needs or new activities, so they can continue to deliver great service within your SLAs.

Serving customers on all channels

In the Service Cloud, you can manage productive customer engagements consistently across all channels customers choose to interact with your firm. The solution’s omni-channel capabilities can help you transform your service team at a new level of ease and efficiency with unwavering customer focus.

You can flexibly add channels to your contact center’s resources, and agents can follow customer’s lead in switching from one to another. At any point, agents and managers have a full, consolidated, omni-channel view of customers and their relationship with your company. When they reach out to customers, agents can connect with them through voice communications, chat, email, direct messaging, or social media.

At the start of every customer interaction, the Service Cloud helps you make the best use of team member skills. Omni-Channel Routing involves the employee who can best meet the customer’s needs, based on the agent’s experience, workload, and availability. You can configure this feature to suit your priorities for responding to customers and making the best use of people’s strengths.

Organizational knowledge helps customers and agents succeed

Many professional services firms own a wealth of specialized expertise and insight, often resulting from many years of practice by company executives and experts. Through the Service Cloud, you can make certain that your customers and agents can draw on your organization’s knowledge assets when they have a need for them.

For customers, your knowledge articles can be part of their self-service. You can deliver content wherever they like to engage—on your website, in your digital community, through a portal, or by means of your organization’s mobile app. You can use chat bots enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) to offer content in response to customers’ questions and interests.

In agents’ workspaces, they can receive automatic recommendations from the company’s knowledge base for possibly relevant content items they could share and discuss with a customer. They can preview the file to verify that it’s appropriate and helpful, and single-click share it in the customer’s preferred channel. Details regarding customers’ content consumption become part of the case details agents see in their workspaces.

In the background, Salesforce runs analytics to help you understand which articles professional services customers and agents find most helpful and for which of their concerns you might want to provide additional content. Other Salesforce technology can quietly ensure that the use of knowledge articles follows the company’s standards for serving customers.

A unified software environment with an excellent user experience

At a time of intense competition for the best talent with a lot of generational turnover and other churn in the workforce, professional services companies need to empower customer-facing agents with the best tools to translate their skills into customer value. The Service Cloud is highly intuitive and usable, designed for simplicity and efficiency. It allows agents to focus on what they do best: help customers.

Your team members can spend their work day in one single software tool, the Service Cloud’s agent workspace. This console offers a unified view of customers’ case-related interactions with the organization and its agents, no matter whether they communicate through email, phone calls, or other channels. Through the console, agents can use customers’ preferred mode of communication to contact them without navigating multiple software tools. Inbound and outbound phone communications can be part of the agent workspace, managed as simply as everything else. When customers call in, the workspace can automatically display their record with current case details.

Team managers can configure the workspace to surface the information that will be most helpful for agents. Often, they will be able to configure data flows so that screen fields can already show the most likely details, saving agents from having to enter them manually. They can use the solution’s AI capabilities to provide agents with recommendations on the most likely best next steps to take for the customer. Many agents will also benefit from seeing information from various business systems pulled into their workspace.

Gathering customer feedback to drive business analytics and improvements

You need to know how customers feel about your organization and how your agents take care of their cases. The best time to learn this is when interactions and case events are fresh in their memory, before their engagement wanes. In the Service Cloud, you can create surveys to gauge customers’ satisfaction with agents’ case handling. You can configure the system to send customer surveys after certain events, such as an agent asking for expert assistance or recording a case as resolved. Agents can also push a single button to forward a survey to a customer.

In your survey design, you can use standard methodologies such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) to quantify customer satisfaction. Returning customer satisfaction scores can become part of their individual record to help agents in the future. When they feed into Salesforce analytics and reporting tools and dashboards, they can also help you drive organizational intelligence and continuously improve how you serve customers.

Taking the next step

Sikich knows how to help you realize the best outcomes from bringing Salesforce into your professional services business. As a Salesforce partner with many technical certifications, we have a successful track record of more than 15 years helping professional services firms and other organizations take advantage of Salesforce to serve customers, empower employees, and drive growth.

If you want to connect with us or find out more, contact the Sikich team or watch our webinar “How Salesforce Enables the Support and Service Your Clients Demand in 2021.”