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Ensuring every interaction between service representation and customer is delightful is impossible.

The customer's bad experience is often not due to technical limitations at the service representative's end.

Here's how Salesforce Service Cloud helps service representatives overcome the 9 most common challenges they must face daily.

Challenge #1: Managing customer feedback

Customer service reps are often overwhelmed with the number of customer complaints they receive. They don't have a process to feed customer feedback, and hence it never reaches the ear of the right stakeholders

Solution: Salesforce Service Cloud provides customer support agents with an organized view into customer interactions, enabling them to quickly identify trends and patterns of customer pain points and preferences. This helps resolve cases faster and increases customer satisfaction scores drastically. For example:

• Agents use case assignment rules to route incoming requests (feedback) for immediate resolution or reassignment based on priority or specific customer profile
• A help wizard guides users through steps that match their department's preferred customer service workflow
• Leads can enter customer feedback directly in Salesforce Service Cloud, where customer info is available to agents via an agreement record

Challenge #2: Lack of customer context

Customer support agents often turn to old case notes or voicemail transcripts which rarely provide enough information. The customer service reps must rely on the customer to reiterate the details, wasting time and leading to longer call times and higher dissatisfied customers.

Solution: Service Cloud interactive voice response (IVR) lets customer service reps' route incoming calls directly to their queue after retrieving customer data from a directory—including account info, case history, and contract information—so they can quickly resolve cases and cut down on hold time even before picking up the phone.

Challenge #3: Siloed customer service

Customer service agents typically use a variety of tools to handle customer requests. This makes their job more complicated and slows down customer service as they have to switch software frequently.

Solution: Service Cloud case management tool helps customer service teams collaborate on cases with internal and external customers by enabling them to track exchanges in one place whether or not they are using email or social channels

Tapping into Social Channels - Customers can enter their comments on a case through a company Facebook page, Twitter profile, or even a blog—customer care agents can directly route those posts to the customer support team

Automating customer feedback - Agents can easily access customer information to resolve cases by using customer profile fields to route tweets, posts, and comments directly to the accurate customer account.

Challenge #4: Lack of a 360-degree view of customers

Customer service agents often have trouble tracking all their customer interactions across various channels—email, social media, or chat—which results in countless hours spent on case research. In many instances, this leads to multiple calls or emails with customers as reps gather customer info from different sources for each case. This impacts customer satisfaction scores and increases customer churn rate as well.

Solution: Sales Service Cloud allows customer care teams to organize customer information in one place. Information about customer contacts, case history, cases they are currently working on—is all available on customer profiles, making it easier for customer service reps to access customer data quickly and resolve issues faster.

Challenge #5: Aging customer knowledge base

Customer service teams often struggle with the proliferation of email communications resulting in a fragmented customer interactions database lacking customer context. This leads to a more extended case resolution due to poor search functionality. In addition, agents cannot easily track an entire customer interactions history, reducing customer satisfaction scores.

Solution: Service Cloud allows customers to search across existing email conversations, social media posts, chat transcripts, voice recordings, contracts and more to find customer information quickly and resolve customer cases faster.

Challenge #6: Inconsistent customer service

Customer service rep performance is often measured by customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and customer effort scores (CES). With the customer engagement levels constantly shifting, customer service reps cannot predict how much customer effort they need to resolve a case. This unpredictability impacts customer experience as well as customer retention rates.

Solution: Salesforce Service Cloud Customer Success Management (CSM) tool captures customer interactions across multiple channels and measures the level of engagement along with preference and sentiment analysis to help customer service reps understand their customers' expectations and set accurate expectations for future interactions. This allows them to mitigate churn risks by improving CSAT scores and reducing customer effort levels to lower customer churn rates.

Challenge #7: Customer satisfaction

Customer service agents are overwhelmed with too many customer cases and insufficient time. Service Cloud allows customer care teams to leverage real-time analytics by viewing the results of social media campaigns, text sentiment analysis reports, and contact centre reports within one consolidated customer view, allowing them to handle more cases every day, leading directly to improved CSAT scores.

Solution: Salesforce Service Cloud enables customer support managers to increase their team's productivity by providing instant insights into business processes impacting customers' experience. It allows customer service managers to monitor contract changes using powerful built-in data analysis tools, resulting in improved customer satisfaction scores, leading to increased customer retention rates and customer lifetime value.

Challenge #8: Productivity issues

Sales reps often have to compete with customer service agents to access customer records, resulting in higher customer effort levels, lower customer satisfaction scores, and higher churn rates. To mitigate this challenge, enterprises are looking at the customer service team's performance metrics on case resolution time, customer experience sentiment, etc, to measure their effectiveness working together as a team for better customer engagement.

Solution: Salesforce Service Cloud provides customer support managers with accurate reports of agent activity resulting in more visibility into territories, rep performance and other critical business insights that help them collaborate across teams leading directly to improved customer retention rates and customer lifetime value.

Challenge #9: Keeping up with evolving product roadmaps

Customer service managers face the challenge of constantly keeping customer service reps up to date with customer case information as it changes and evolves as a result of product advancements.

The customer support software enables customer support managers to monitor customer knowledge base usage providing valuable insights into customer behavior enabling them to provide better customer case resolution leading directly to increased customer satisfaction scores impacting customer retention rates positively.

Conclusion

Today, businesses cannot afford to lose customers due to poor quality of Service. Customer needs constantly evolve, necessitating establishments to be ahead of the curve to provide excellent services.

Customer expectations have become significantly more demanding over the years, with the number of options available today almost overwhelming all but the most confident buyers. Businesses that want a competitive edge need customer service reps and customer support managers that are knowledgeable, efficient and customer-driven leading to customer retention rates and customer lifetime value improvements.