5 Top New Year Resolutions for the Customer Service Team

The fifth edition of the Salesforce State of Connected Customer report found that a whopping 97% of the Indian respondents admitted to customer service influencing their buying decisions. And 94% agreed that excellent customer service builds trust.

Clearly, the importance of customer service as a key differentiator is increasing. As we approach 2023, customer service professionals must explore new ways to unlock profitability and achieve efficient growth. Here are some new year resolutions that you can take inspiration from to refresh your strategy.

Some popular picks by service teams: Which ones would you choose?

Long hold times and delayed call transfers are so 90s! Provide a delightful service experience by making it very easy for customers to contact you. Here’s how:

• Remove unnecessary barriers. Reduce the number of automated messages a customer encounters before talking to a human. Offer customers the option to quickly switch to a human agent during chatbot interactions.

60% of customers still prefer interacting with a human instead of a chatbot

• If a designated team member is unavailable, the customer must be able to reach another member at the earliest.
• Transfer calls only when absolutely necessary. Before transferring, let the customer know why it is needed and who they will be speaking to.

Did you know that 90% of people expect a response to their email within 60 minutes? In this Amazon-esque era of express deliveries, customers obviously do not want to deal with long wait times or unanswered messages. Service agents, therefore, can speed things up by:

• Ensuring they have real-time access to complete customer profiles (including past interactions and purchase history). This data helps set the context and enables agents to offer relevant, personalised service faster.
• Enabling customers to leverage self-service portals and user-friendly knowledge bases. These help customers find responses to routine queries with zero waiting time.
• Setting up alerts to reduce response times on social media, live chat, and other channels.
• Using remotely connected devices and analytics tools to predict/solve issues even before customers flag them.

Offering omnichannel customer service ensures quality service even during peak times. Being present on multiple channels decentralises the customer service process, reducing overcrowding on specific channels. Plus, customers can select the channel that works best for them. Don’t want to talk to an agent? An AI-powered chatbot can assist them. Or does a customer need a super quick response? They can try live chat.

• Your service team must be equipped to manage multiple service delivery channels like video chat, phone calls, SMS, emails, and even in-person interactions in a physical store.You can ensure this by introducing self-training modules like Trailhead for Service Cloud, and also active engagement with customer service leaders.
• Opt for a unified platform likeSalesforce Service Cloud, that integrates multiple touchpoints across channels. With an integrated platform you can put all customer interactions in one place and offer comprehensive, cohesive insights, ensuring consistent and personalised customer service at all touchpoints.

Analysing customer feedback helps identify their concerns, reveals process gaps and lets you personalise experiences based on customer preferences. For this, customer service teams can:

• Use social media engagements, feedback surveys, review forms, and direct interactions to understand how customers feel about your service.
• Ensure that all feedback (even social media comments) is recorded, saved, and shared internally.
• Use the insights from this feedback to improve service quality, explore new channels for service delivery, improve training process for service professionals and so on.
• Relay to the customer that you are listening and working on their suggestions.

According to Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report, 98% of customers feel that trust is built when companies communicate honestly and transparently.When a customer is let down due to any service gap,it doesn’t help to try to hide our tracks. Service leaders must make sure that the responses for any deficiency in service are not generic or unsympathetic.Every communication should resonate with the customer that their concern is important with an assurance to resolve the issue to their satisfaction.

Ensuring transparency in customer service also includes communicating when something is beyond your knowledge or control (instead of confusing the customer with incorrect information) or when some processes have changed.

Help your team stick to their new year resolutions with Salesforce Service Cloud

Making resolutions is the easy part; more importantly, you also need the resources and technology necessary to implement these. With Salesforce Service Cloud, customer service teams get access to a one-stop solution that helps them keep up with all their new year resolutions.

Powered by an in-built AI engine, Service Cloud equips service agents to offer connected, personalised, efficient experiences at scale across channels. Some of the key features of Service Cloud include:

• Easy creation of customised reports and usage of dashboards to analyse customer data
• Live video support and live agent chat options
• Self-service portal for speedy case resolution
• Automated workflows and AI-powered chatbots