Want to avoid the curious case of the disappearing customer? Then it pays to pay attention to customer service.
In particular, businesses must focus on case management to resolve and close cases in record time, and experience management to ensure that they’re delivering the best possible customer service experience.
But for many businesses, taking case management and customer experience capabilities to the next level — to ensure that you’re always delivering the right level of service, at the right time — may require rethinking some longstanding customer service assumptions.
Candy Maker Rethinks Segments
One Cloud Sherpas customer, for example, is a major candy manufacturer that sells billions of dollars’ worth of sweets every year through regional distribution chains that supply everyone from Joe’s Corner Store to Walmart.
Previously, its customer service program was organized by region. But each of these regionally focused customer service groups might see large customer service request spikes at different times of the year, owing for example to back-to-school periods. Other times they might face unpredictable seasonal variations, such as a sudden demand during a northeast heat wave for more chocolate milk, while demand remained constant in Arizona. As a result, one team might not be able to keep up with incoming requests, while another might be relatively underutilized.
Accordingly, the customer approached us with this request: Help us to not just make customers happier with our service, but to load balance incoming requests, to enable our workforce to better balance service queries received across our contact center’s call, chat and email channels.
That request wasn’t academic. Notably, the candy maker’s bigger customers, including Walmart, had negotiated tough service level agreements (SLAs) stipulating just how quickly the manufacturer needed to respond to their service requests. For every one of these requests that the manufacturer couldn’t handle in the pre-agreed timeframe, it suffered a corresponding financial penalty.
Our solution was to help the business redesign its customer segments so they weren’t organized by geography, but rather size and contracted service levels. To facilitate that approach, we also helped he organization implement Salesforce Service Cloud, which ensured that service requests were routed in the most efficient — and correct — manner possible. These changes have helped increase the efficiency of the company’s service teams and enabled them to better satisfy SLA agreements. As a result, the company has also seen an increase in its customer satisfaction scores.
Tracking Service Satisfaction Shows Care
Another Cloud Sherpas customer that’s recently rethought its case and experience management practices — leading to business upsides — is Care.com, which bills itself as “the largest online destination for care.” Notably, the site, which so far serves the United States and Britain, matches nannies, babysitters and home health aides with potential clients.
As noted, by using Salesforce Service Cloud, businesses can optimize their workforce resources to ensure that the right people are assigned to solve the right cases at the right time. But Care.com has taken these capabilities to the next level, by tracking customers’ satisfaction with their service after every case gets closed. Care.com does that by having Salesforce automatically email clients to ensure that they received the service they wanted. This approach also allows managers to follow up on select cases for quality assurance purposes, to help continually refine the business’s customer service practices.
Care.com’s approach isn’t just about managing cases, but maintaining a great customer experience. As with so many aspects of CRM — whether it involves marketing, sales or service — the various components required to maintain a successful and efficient effort don’t work in isolation. Improving case management capabilities and making customer service teams more efficient, in particular, ensures businesses deliver the right service, at the right time, and as quickly as possible.
For customers, who constantly crave the best possible service experience, there’s no mystery how they’ll react.
