Hey, everyone.
How's it going?
I'm Mahua.
We're here to talk about agent productivity today.
As a service leader, we know that a great agent
experience leads to a great customer experience.
But how do you achieve that while reducing costs?
Today I'll share three ways
we are increasing agent productivity at Salesforce.
Sounds good? Let's dive in.
Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce,
an inside look at our sales, service, marketing,
and IT businesses with helpful how-to tips
you can use for your business.
For service professionals,
we'll have tips on things like how to create self-service experiences,
how to deliver proactive service, and so much more.
As always, you can learn more on Trailhead, Salesforce's
online learning platform, which is linked in the description below.
And don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode.
At Salesforce, we call our service team “Support Engineers,”
But in your organization, they might also be known as service agents
or customer representatives. With high customer expectations and high case volume,
the agent experience is essential to the customer experience.
One way to set your teams up for success,
prevent burn out and do more with less is by using
automation and productivity tools.
So what do agents think about all this automation?
77% of agency
automating routine tasks allows them to focus on more complex
work, according to the State of the Connected Customer Report.
With the help of productivity and automation tools, agents can build
customer loyalty through scaled, personalized and connected experiences.
This gives agents time to do what they do best: build customer relationships.
That's a win win.
So here are three ways
Salesforce uses automation and productivity tools.
Tip 1: Automate how you route cases.
At Salesforce, we resolve over a million support cases a year.
With our growing portfolio of products, our global support team
and 150,000 customers worldwide, getting cases to the right person
at the right time is really complex and time sensitive.
In the past, work would be routed to general cues
manually assigned and then re-routed when it landed in the wrong queue.
Today we automate case routing
with Service Cloud Omni-Channel Routing.
Omni routes cases from all of our customer channels
- like phone, embedded chat, and web-to-case -
and finds the best support engineer
to resolve the issue based on the product,
topic and skills needed to resolve the case.
It also considers support engineer availability and caseload.
The Omni-Supervisor Dashboard allows managers
to have a clear view of the work their team is delivering,
ensures teams are focusing on cases in their skill set
and minimizes reloading and cases being left behind.
Best of all, it's an easier experience for customers
and ensures cases are resolved as fast as possible.
Tip 2: Reduce manual processes.
Nothing slows
down productivity like administrative tasks.
For example, logging case details, managing status
updates and toggling between screens.
At Salesforce, we use flows to automate processes
to allow our support engineers to spend their time solving customer problems.
Let me tell you about two simple flows that our team loves:
--status update flow and --automated email flow.
Status Update flows mean that support engineers
no longer need to change the status of a case themselves.
We have common statuses such as "Awaiting Customer Response",
"Working", and "Solution Provided". These are triggered
based on the actions from the customer or our team.
This also gives managers visibility into their teams' caseload
and case progression.
Our email reminder flow manages,
you guessed it, email reminders to our customers when we are waiting for a response.
For example, if a key status is awaiting customer response, our flow triggers
an automated email to remind the customer to respond within two days.
This cadence of reminder
notification continues based on a pre-set schedule.
So if you don't hear from the customer within five days,
our flow will automatically close the case.
It also emails the customer, giving them
ten days to reopen the case if they wish.
Fun fact: Marketing Cloud powers our email sends
and gives us rich insights into how customers
are engaging with our emails and updates.
All right, that brings us to our last step.
Tip #3: Bring in the right experts at the right time.
Salesforce has a global support team spread across 19 countries
and an even larger pool of experts from R&D and product.
How do we make sure we bring the right experts
in at the right time to solve a complex case?
Through Slack. Slack is our digital HQ
driving collaboration between our teams from all around the world to assist
when solutions are needed quickly. In Salesforce support,
we use Slack to swarm cases. Let me explain.
Customer service teams
traditionally follow an escalation model.
This means there are different tiers of agents.
Agents would escalate customer's cases to the next tier
when they were unable to find a resolution.
This makes for a frustrating customer experience as the customer
would have to repeat their issues several times and cause further delays.
Today, our support engineers work on a tierless swarming model.
This means there is one case owner who's the primary point of contact
with the customer throughout the duration of the case.
This case owner will use the collective expertise of a team
to solve a case if they are unable to resolve on their own.
Let me walk you through it.
When our Support Engineers need help on a case,
they initiate a Slack Swarm directly
within the Service Console, using the Slack for Service integration.
This brings our support engineer and a team of experts
together in a Slack channel to collaborate.
Once the group determines the solution, the case owner shares
that with our customer. For the customer,
this means access to expert advice with only one point of contact.
Already, swarming with Slack has decreased our case
resolution time by 26%.
Well, there you have it. Three ways you can use automation
and productivity tools to supercharge your agent experience.
Check out the additional resource provided and be sure to watch the other episodes
in this series to learn how we at Salesforce use our products
to deliver exceptional service experiences.
We'll see you next time.