How to reduce costs and shorten customer service time

What makes up the cost of customer service?

First of all, its effectiveness — if your consultants often make mistakes, you will certainly notice a significant ebb of customers. This generates costs — gaining a new customer for your company is 6-7 times more expensive than maintaining an existing one.

Secondly, time — the faster your consultants can work, the more customers they will serve, so the cost of one case will decrease. What can you do to improve the work of your team and gain even more?

Answer the phone without picking up the handset

The total time of taking a call consists of several factors: physical reception of the call, recognition of the customer based on data, searching for data which the customer is referring to. These operations often take a lot of time, especially if information about the customer is dispersed in many systems. Having an implemented CRM, all customer data should be in one place.

By integrating Salesforce with telephone exchanges it is possible to automatically raise the customer’s card based on the phone number. In addition, the telephone exchange can transmit additional information provided by the customer, such as choosing an order number in the phone.

Support customers from multiple channels in one place

Nowadays, customers can ask consultants questions via many channels — by phone, e-mail, chat or social media. Changing from channel to channel takes up a lot of time but also the energy of your team. What if it was possible to connect all channels in one place?

In Salesforce, Omni-Channel is responsible for multi-channel service, thanks to which the agent can manage his availability in one place.

An important aspect is agent availability management so that all channels are served with the right quality. The manager in charge of the customer service department has a real-time overview of the occupancy of each channel or the availability of agents. Thanks to Omni Supervisor it is possible to report the time spent in different statuses or service channels by individual agents.

Sorting out the queries

We all want the query we are raising to be handled in the shortest possible time, but the customer service centre is not able to handle all cases at the same time. CRM allows customer segmentation, so that it can automatically determine that VIP customer queries should be given the highest priority. Another case in which Salesforce can support the work of the customer service department is the categorization of cases based on, for example, the e-mail address to which the queries are sent. In addition, Service Cloud has a milestone mechanism that can trigger notifications and escalate queries to supervisors if the service time at a given stage exceeds a defined time limit.

Collect customer data

The more the team knows about customers, the faster they can conduct talks and effectively solve their problems. You are also well aware that the customer journey does not only pass through the customer service department but also includes marketing, sales, and logistics departments. That is why it is so valuable to have all the necessary information about the customer — from the channel from which he came, through the products/services ordered so far, order statuses, to complaints and others. In order to improve the operation, it is worth thinking about building the client’s history and the so-called 360 view, thanks to which the consultant has all the information at his or her fingertips. They don’t have search through the mailbox or wait for a message from another department — just a few mouse clicks in the Salesforce Service Cloud system suffice.

Create a knowledge base

The more you know, the faster you act. However, we know that human memory is sometimes unreliable and nobody is able to remember everything, so it is worth thinking about building a knowledge base. It will be a useful tool both for consultants, who will be able to support themselves with information during the conversation with the customer, as well as for the customers themselves, who if they are interested in the given subject and will be able to explore the knowledge on their own.

You can create a knowledge base in Service Cloud using the Knowledge module. Your agents will surely know what queries they deal with most often and most likely handle them in a similar way. Transferring this knowledge to a knowledge base in the form of an article will allow you to shorten the time of onboarding new people, as well as handling repetitive queries. Knowledge in Salesforce automatically adjusts knowledge base articles to the content of the query reported by the customer, which additionally facilitates the work of the agent.

Think about customer self-service

With articles ready for internal use, you’ll be a step away from building a public customer base, which will allow you to ensure customer self-service and relieve the burden on the customer service department. Salesforce can also help you with through the Community Cloud, where you can easily build a portal for customers and publish selected articles from the knowledge base.

Improve data quality

How many times in your career have you found two contacts with a very similar name? The duplication of data is not only annoying but also disrupts work and collects a lot of unnecessary information. How can you avoid such duplication? Take advantage of CRM Salesforce, which has configurable mechanisms of data deduplication, thanks to which you will avoid information chaos, streamline work and… reduce costs.

Use the available data for analysis

Activity monitoring and reporting are very important elements of managing the work of customer service management. Thanks to this you have the knowledge of what needs to be improved, what to throw away, and what to add to the customer contact scheme. The CRM Salesforce system helps you to generate relevant statements and reports.

The data collected in CRM will allow you to study service quality indicators, such as First Call Resolution, service time per channel.

However, it is important that this does not become a tool of strong control — leave employees a certain amount of freedom of action and allow them to make their own ingenious decisions. Perhaps they will be able to develop an optimal customer service system themselves.

Improve the transfer of information between company departments

In a company, as in life, the transfer of necessary information between departments can function differently. Improve communication between departments with CRM Salesforce. Thanks to the cloud and the 360 view, each employee has full insight into the information, and all the data can be found right away. In addition, they can freely communicate with each other with the internal Chatter communicator, without going beyond the CRM environment. This significantly simplifies the process of employee contact and streamlines the work of all departments.

Does customer service generate only costs?

Customer service based on the 360-degree view offers also a possibility of low-cost upselling. Based on the information available in CRM about the customer’s previous purchases, his problems and interests, a Consultant can make an additional or complementary offer. Such a way of meeting the customer’s expectations facilitates not only upselling but also building his loyalty to the brand.

There are two most important factors in generating savings — time and the number of mistakes made. The more you manage to reduce them, the more benefits you can gain and your customer service will be perceived as effective and fast. It is worth thinking about CRM Salesforce, which will help you improve the work of your team. Write to us and find out more.