Salesforce.com Service Cloud

Introduction

What does Service mean to you?

As a Service Cloud Consultant, or at least as an aspirant answering this question in a way that makes sense to you and you client is of utmost importance to a successful implementation of the Service Cloud.

To me Service is what my client wants. It is my job to help him achieve it. To me it is this simple. But there are times when you have to force your client to really think about what he wants. Having the courage to do this, and the technique to do it in a way that actually motivates your client to rethink and possibly rework some of his business processes guarantees a successful implementation of the Service Cloud

What type of service organisation am I dealing with?

Understanding the type of service organization you will be building a solution for is of utmost importance for a successful implementation. This might sound like a trivial step but it isn't. Is your client's service organisation based on his products and services? is it opened to all his clients or is it an internal help desk for his employees? what are the business hours? 24/7? is it a telesales service organization? are support agents up-selling or cross selling when dealing with customer issues? is it a hot line of some sort? does the support organization have field agents?

Understanding how your client's organization is structured in detail is the most important think you have to start thinking about even before you begin with the planning phase of your implementation.

If you landed on this blog, I am pretty sure you know what Salesforce.com is. So the second most important question is:

What is the Service Cloud?

In my own words,

the Service Cloud refers to a variety of methodologies and tools which can be variably combined with one another depending on the requirements and needs of YOUR CLIENT to help him grow his business, by keeping his customers satisfied and loyal, making his service agents more productive and doing all of this in the most cost efficient way possible.

Although not all of these tools and methodologies were invented by the bright folks at Salesforce.com e.g KCS (Knowledge Centered Solution), CTI (Computer Telefony Integration), Waterfall Model for your Service Cloud Implementation just to name a few, what they have brilliantly done, is to engineer tools like the Service Cloud Console, the Knowledge base etc. and packaged these neatly into what we call the Service Cloud.

Notice that in my definition I wrote YOUR CLIENT. I am laying emphasis on your client because it is important, that you start thinking of your client and the service challenges he is facing as being very unique to him. Two clients might and will in most cases want exactly the same thing. But their implementations will most likely never be the same although you will use the same Service Cloud. Your job as a Service Cloud Consultant is to find out what makes your client unique, what makes his business tick and then use this information to create a unique Service Cloud solution well tailored to fit your clients needs. Next lets look at why we need the Service Cloud.

Why you need the Service Cloud

There are probably hundreds of tools out there that can be used to aid your client's business and possibly make it grow. But are any of these tools as versatile and easy to implement as the Service Cloud? I doubt it.
When a potential client approaches you to discuss a service issue, more often than not, they will be looking to improve one of the following;

• customer satisfacton (CSAT)
• agent performance
• cost efficiency

Customer Satisfaction

Your client's customers are the center of his business. Without them, your client will not have any business at all and you will most likely be unemployed. So you have to do your best to help your client keep his customers satisfied and loyal because helping your client is helping yourself. Your client's customers will most likely require the following to keep them happy;

• to be heard, listened to and taken seriously
• to avoid having to repeat themselves and restate their problems each time they contact support
• to avoid waiting in queues forever to speak to an agent
• to have their issues resolved almost immediately and not being bounced from one Agent or department to another
• to have their issues resolved the first time they call support
• sufficient communication flow when they report an issue and it is bring processed
• ability to solve problems on their on by using tools you provide

These are some of the few things that you will need to think about when your client tells you he wants to improve his customer satisfaction. You will need to ask your client some tough questions to discover why his customers are dissatisfied. You might need to question and challenge some of you client's business processes.

After fully understanding your client's problems and the causes, you will need to think about which Service Cloud components are best suited to solve your client's problems;

• do support agents need a lot of time to find the data they need to respond to customers? how about Knowledge base and Solutions or Chatter Answers to throw suggested solutions at your agents without them having to do anything? etc....
• are agents having trouble identifying clients and the type of support they are entitled to? how about IVR(Interactive Voice Response) together with CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) to pull up your user's data before the agent even answers the call. How about setting up Entitlements, so agents can immediately see on the Account, Contact, Asset, Product or Contract what level and type of support a user is entitled to? etc...
• are frustrated customers hanging up because they are waiting in the queue forever? how about using IVR to aid them solve some of their problems or suggest alternatives? how about using call deflection techniques like Self-Service portals, Customer Portals with FAQ and Knowledge article sections so your clients' customers wouldn't have to call support at all? or maybe your client just needs to hire more agents?

These are a few thoughts that should swirl around your head once you have identified your clients problems and causes and are moving into the solution design phase. But do not forget that just because you can do something does not mean you should do it. YOUR CLIENT IS UNIQUE, SO IS HIS SOLUTION.

Agent Performance

We established above that without happy and loyal customers, you as a Service Cloud Consultant will be unemployed because your client will run out of business eventually. Guess what, same holds for support agents because it is their job to keep the clients happy. More important, they are the voice and sometimes the face of your client's organization. Big responsibility.

Support agents might complain about the following;

• outdated systems which make it difficult for them to do their job
• having to pull in data from a couple of different systems when answering customer issues
• having to ask the customer for his information each time he calls
• fatigue and long or inflexible working hours

These are some of the things agents will generally complain about. Some will complain about the pay but that is nothing we as Service Cloud consultants can do to help with this problem. But if we help out client cut service cost, he just might be able to pay his agents more, who will in turn keep the customers satisfied and spending more and we get to be employed. How about that.

You will need to spend time with the support agents to understand what their pain points are. After that you will be in a better position to use the Service Cloud to address their issues. When designing a solution to increase agent performance, you should think about the following;

•  should the agent have all the information he needs to be able to service his client as soon as he says hello?. This implies already knowing who the client is, what level of service he is entitled to, his activity history, any previous exchanged emails, his Assets or products, etc. basically everything. How about the setting up a Call Center with Service Cloud Console with an integrated Softphone? this will pull up and display all the customer information an agent needs and some of the information he needs to solve the customers issue e.g suggested solutions, knowledge articles. The agent can send emails to the customer with product details, answers to questions etc., write history logs, document case details, create articles etc. without ever leading the service console. Pretty slick stuff.
• how would you reduce the call volume the agents have to deal with daily? how about implementing call deflection techniques such as Self-Service Portals where customers can self register, open cases and monitor the status of their cases? how about implementing Web-to-Case and Email-to-Case capabilities to automatically create and assign cases to your agents so cases are more efficiently handled? how about exposing the live Agent on your client's website of Customer Portal and implementing skill-based routing so each agent gets to work on cases best suited to his abilities

These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself as you venture into the design phase of your Service Cloud implementation aimed at increasing agent performance.

Cost Efficiency

Last but not the least is the issue of cost efficiency. Your client might realize he has to keep many different system alive so he can serve his customers. This is not only costly but also slows down agents when they are servicing client issues. 

This directly leads to the second issue your client might want to address; the Average Handle Time (AHT). This is basically the time the agent spends with the client. Keeping this time to as minimum as possible, while still giving your customers the best service possible is a key to saving cost.

Some on the techniques already mentioned above can also be used here to solve this problem. If the agent has all the information he needs at his fingertips or is one screen a way from it, serving the client quickly and efficiently becomes a piece of cake. This will also require that you client has all of the information in one system. There are times when this is neither desirable nor possible. In this you can leverage the amazing capabilities of Apex and Visualforce to ensure that your service agent is still just one screen away from the information he needs.

Wrap-up time is also very important when talking about efficiency and saving cost. Support agents might need this time to search for and email a solution to client, write case comments, document a solution or create an article etc. How much wrap-up time do support agents need between calls? How can this time be maximized efficiently thereby reducing cost?

Call deflection is in my opinion the most important factor when your client strives to minimize cost or be cost efficient. If your clients to not need to call you to have their problems solved or questions answered, you would not need to think about AHT, wrap-up time etc. There should be no need for your customer to call you to ask a question that has been asked a hundred times by other customers. There should be no need for your customer to call you if his question or issue does not require immediate assistance. How about "call back" possibilities or letting users create cases through other channels such as the Web, Email, Portals and Live Agent. 

The Service Cloud offers very powerful Call deflection possibilities. If your client request to be more cost efficient, I will recommend you immerse your self completely in call deflection and do not come out if you will not make your customer smile from ear to ear.

Having looked at the general reasons why you might need to implement the Service Cloud, let's look briefly at how you would go about it.

The First Steps

1. Identify your metrics. How would you know that your Service Cloud implementation was a success if you can't measure it's outcome
2. Identify an executive sponsor. This is absolutely necessary for adoption. If your Service Cloud solution is not being used, then it is worthless. You need an executive sponsor to champion the whole project, build hype and get everyone motivated.

When these two steps are taken, you can then go ahead with gathering your requirements. There are two main ways to gather requirements. The first would be to watch your client in action. I recommend being your client's inactive service agent for a day or more if needed. This means you actually sit with your client's service agents for a whole day, observe how they do their job and ask questions. The most important of which should revolve around "pain points". These are the people who deal with the clients on a daily basis and therefore in the best position to tell you what is wrong with the system.

The second way to gather your requirements would be to talk with the most important Stakeholders since the success of your Service Cloud implementation will of great interest to them. These will also mostly likely be the people with whom you will define your metrics for success. All these steps belong to the planning phase of your project.

From here on you will then move through the different project phases of design, build, test, validate and deploy. These however are topics of their own that we will look at on another.

Components of the Service Cloud.

I salute you if you have read up to this point. I know this is not an easy read. In this section, I will just list the most commonly used components of the Service Cloud. In later post I will examine each and everyone of them in detail, what they are good for and when to use them. So stay tune.
The Service Cloud offers the following powerful features which you can used to address your clients service concers;

• Service Cloud Console. Requires a Call Center App. Very useful when integrated with the Case Management Process, Case feed, Live Agent and the SoftPhone
• IVC, CTI and the SoftPhone
• Live Agent
• Case Management (Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, Assignment, Auto-response & Escalation Rules etc.)
• Case Feed
• Entitlements
• Knowledge Base
• Chatter Answers (Solutions & Ideas)
• Self-Service Portals
• Service Cloud Portals (Communities)
• Mobile (Salesforce 1 for field agents)

These are the main components which make up the Service Cloud. These components will be looked at in more detail in upcoming post. Stay tuned.

Conclusion

Although I would have liked to jump directly into the different components of the Service Cloud, I believe handling them in different post will be much more efficient.
The central theme of my discussion has been; you have to listen to your client because he is unique, has unique problems and require a unique Service Cloud implementation. Challenge my views and ideas and start a conversation so we can all learn and grow. I thank your for reading.