But do you care what customers feel?

You should, because having a good read on customer emotions will have a big bearing on what customers think and do as well.

This is why empathy is so important across every industry, and why it has to be the cornerstone of your customer service strategy.

Take financial services as an example. Lots of banks and insurance companies offer a wide range of products and services, from checking accounts to coverage for their home and automobile. Their rates might be in line with competitors. They might be digitally-savvy firms with the ability to connect across email, chat and even social.

From the customer’s perspective, though, what’s truly important is how they’ll be treated when they come to the financial institution for help.

Making decisions about money can be stressful and anxiety producing. Customers want to feel confident in their choices, and you can help by providing a service that takes into account what they may be going through in a particular moment.

This can become more challenging for organizations when they’re trying to boost empathy as a whole. An individual bank teller or insurance agent might have a highly developed sense of what’s known as affective empathy, where they get a tingling or other sensation in response to talking to a customer in person.

What organizations need, however, is better cognitive empathy, which is an ability to identify an emotion even if it’s through a digital customer experience.

Here’s how you begin to cultivate that skill, whether you’re on the front lines or leading and coaching a team behind the scenes:

1. Talk like a customer

Start by thinking about the opposite of empathy — when you’ve been in a situation where someone clearly seems disconnected to your emotional state.

When we’re children, for instance, we might fall down and cry. A nearby adult may not immediately show as much concern as our parent. That’s okay, because we have our parents to provide the empathetic response.

In business situations a company employee may be the only other party on the scene. So when customers feel like the employee isn’t recognizing how they feel, they can get even more upset.

You can help bridge this gap by training service agents and other members of the team to use statements that convey that sense of empathy.

Examples here include “I understand how frustrating it is when . . .” or “I realize how complicated this can be.”

When customers hear this, they know the agent or employee is trying to put themselves in their situation, and they appreciate it.

2. Provide enough room for emotions to be released

Many businesses are understandably eager to reduce call times in their contact centres and get more service issues resolved, but empathy is never achieved by rushing customers.

It can take time for customers to feel comfortable enough to convey how they feel. Sometimes they won’t be sure how best to articulate their feelings. And feelings can be complicated, which means they need time to have a company hear them out.

Make sure you take the time to listen, and where necessary offer additional feedback mechanisms. This could include a survey, an email address for customers to share more details in writing or simply routing them to someone who can give them the extra attention they need.

3. Commit to emotional outcomes

You can tell a customer you’re going to help them change their account settings. Or you can tell them you’re going to make the process of making changes to their account settings easier for them so they can get on with their busy day.

Notice the difference? It’s the same in telling a customer something as simple as, “We want you to be happy with this service, and we’re going to keep working on improving it until you can’t wait to share the inside secret with your friends.”

These kinds of statements not only treat the customer like a human being, but treat a positive emotion as a goal or target, beyond simply resolving the issue.

Making empathy an ongoing process

One of the other best ways to demonstrate empathy is by following up after an issue has been resolved.

Think about when you share bad news with a friend about an upcoming medical appointment. What does it feel like when they call the day after the appointment to see how it went?

Companies can do something similar using a variety of digital tools. They can also do a more formal check-in through feedback surveys that don’t simply touch upon product or service issues but emotional moments of the customer journey.

Don’t simply look at empathy as a way to calm customers down, or to prevent them from leaving your company for a competitor.

When you show empathy to customers, they open up in powerful ways. They share more information about their wants and needs because, in showing that you care, they can trust that you actually want to know.

This provides incredible opportunities to improve your existing products and services and introduce new ones. You can also fine-tune the experience you provide in ways that are more certain to resonate with your customers.

You call empathy a secret weapon, but this isn’t a battle. Think of empathy as a smart investment that can offer a wealth of knowledge instead.

The post How To Learn Empathy And Better Connect To Your Customers appeared first on Salesforce.

They ask smart questions that show they’ve done their research.

They offer feedback on the products they are shown. and they make comments to a friend they brought in with them.

This may sound like something reserved for a physical, in-person experience, but the rise of connected consumers means this exact scene can play out online, through digital channels.

“Walking into the store,” just means they’ve arrived at your website and are browsing your product pages.

“Asking smart questions” could be inquiries they make via chatbot, email or social media.

The feedback they offer, meanwhile, could be what they share on a review site, on their social accounts or even as they text their family and friends.

Here’s the big challenge: as a business, you need to be just as intuitive and consistent in how you welcome and provide value to connected consumers as you’ve traditionally done offline.

Is your website ready to “greet” a connected consumer, for example, in the sense it’s easy to navigate? Are you available to take their questions and respond quickly? Are you aware of how they’re sharing their experience once they’ve made a purchase from you?

To be fair, there are lots of companies still catching up to the needs and expectations of connected consumers, in part because they didn’t emerge overnight.

It took time for technology to become more affordable and accessible for people across different demographics and geographies. Adoption of tools and digital channels happened steadily but not immediately. It was more like a wave sweeping across the sand than a light switch being turned on.

Today, though, connected consumers are quickly becoming the majority of almost any firm’s target market. Here’s how to spot them, and to ensure you build the right relationship with them:

What connected consumers want to see

Companies don’t want to turn any business away, so the old approach was to make marketing appeal “to the masses,” where the same message was aimed at everyone. The ability to collect, manage and make sense of customer data means connected consumers expect a more personalized experience.

They want to see an email newsletter that not only addresses them by name, but includes promotions that reflect their purchase histories. They want to get text notifications that let them know when a new item comes in that could complement something they’ve already bought, or when something they had expressed interest in goes on sale. They want proof the company remembers their preferences on everything from the sizes and colours of the products they buy to the way they pay for them.

What connected consumers want to hear

Let’s start with what they don’t want to hear: hold music, an agent who asks them to repeat information they’ve already given elsewhere, or any indication they have been forgotten by your business.

Companies that understand connected consumers are not only quick to respond, but give specific help based on what they know about them. These companies show they’ve been listening, whether it’s a survey that’s been filled out or feedback they’ve given on social media or a call.

Connected consumers don’t just want to hear from companies, though. They are in constant conversation with their peers to get advice on products, companies and prices. Successful businesses show they understand these discussions are happening, and improve how they operate accordingly.

How connected consumers want to move

A physical store or office used to be the hub around which everything in a company revolved. That’s no longer true of a company’s website.

Connected consumers want businesses to come to them, or at least make it easy to engage. Some will use your company’s mobile app. Some will tweet their requests or send a direct message on Twitter or Instagram. Others will send an email, a text or even sign in to a virtual consultation via videoconference.

Taking what’s called an “omnichannel” approach to marketing, sales and service used to be an opportunity for businesses. Now it’s an imperative. It’s worth it, though, because if you provide value at every touchpoint, you’ll reap the benefits of increased loyalty and revenue.

What connected customers want to feel

Technology has given customers so much power, but it also poses some risks and challenges that businesses need to keep in mind.

When connected customers hand over their data to a company, for instance, they want to feel a sense of trust that it will be handled securely, and that their privacy will be respected.

Using digital channels and tools should also be different when they’re acting as a consumer versus when they’re at work. Browsing and shopping online should feel fun, exciting, but also relaxing. The experience they have should feel memorable, and something they want to share with their family and friends.

Connected consumers also want to feel the brands they support have a sense of purpose. That could mean they are somehow active in their local community, or that they make contributions towards causes that reflect their own values. Perhaps most importantly, connected consumers want to feel — even if they don’t come out and articulate it quite this way — that they’re in a real relationship with a company.

A real relationship is one in which both parties actively participate, listen to each other and react in ways that are helpful. A real relationship is also not static but continues to evolve. In other words, connected consumers should feel the companies they do business with are in an ongoing process of learning more about them, and continuing to make the experience they offer better and better.

Serving connected consumers may sound more difficult, but the technologies required are available to even the smallest businesses. And when you use them effectively, your business becomes more predictable in the way it delivers value, more efficient in how it operates and much faster to grow.

The post What, Exactly, Is The Connected Consumer? appeared first on Salesforce.

Building customer trust has always been important for companies, but perhaps never more so than today.

CEOs around the world are concerned about consumer trust in business, and rightfully so. Edelman, a global communications firm, published “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: In Brands We Trust?” The company reported:

• A major consideration for brand purchase is now “I must be able to trust the brand to do what is right,” at 81 per cent.
• More than 70 per cent link purchase to considerations that historically were tied to trust in corporations, including supply chain, reputation, values, environmental impact, and customer before profit.

Business leaders have reason to be concerned: Consumer trust is essential for building and sustaining a viable company. To develop or regain consumer trust, it’s important that your company act with integrity at every level of management and in every interaction with your customers. Let’s explore how to do just that, plus discuss why it’s important to build customers’ trust in the first place.

The Importance of Trust

Global research from Gallup, which was conducted in 2017, found that more than two-thirds of adults around the world believe business corruption is widespread in their country. This means many consumers don’t have enough trust in corporations. In many cases, that’s justifiable — consider, for example, that data breaches and a lack of corporate social responsibility regularly make headlines both nationally and abroad.

This unfortunately means that companies aren’t starting from neutral ground when it comes to building customers’ trust. They’re starting from behind, and it takes effort to make up for lost ground and establish authentic relationships and a trusting relationship with consumers. That’s especially true in today’s globalized context: Customers have more companies to choose from than ever before, and many companies aren’t able to build in-person relationships with their customers.

To make up for the lack of personal contact, many customers rely on other factors to assess a company’s trustworthiness, including:

• Its ethical track record
• The way it treats its customers and employees
• The quality of its products and services
• Its commitment to social responsibility

Corporate responsibility is especially important to younger generations who generally don’t want to support companies that are engaged in unethical practices.

Why is it worth investing in these practices and other markers to boost consumer trust? There are many good reasons, not least among them is that It’s the right thing to do.

• Customers are more likely to purchase from a brand they trust than one they don’t.
• Consumer trust enhances the odds that customers will remain loyal to your brand over the long term.
• Customers who trust in your brand are likely to recommend it to their network of friends, family members, colleagues, and so on, thereby marketing your company via word-of-mouth advertising.
• Customers are willing to spend more with companies that have earned their trust.
• Establishing trust with customers means they’ll be more likely to forgive your company if, or when, it makes a mistake.

It’s no doubt clear: Your company should be committed to building customer trust at every point of contact.

How Companies Can Earn Customers’ Trust

Consumer trust starts with good business practices. Customers are more inclined to trust in a company that creates quality products or services, charges a fair price for those offerings, receives good ratings and reviews, and treats them and other customers well. Here are some guidelines for making these factors integral pillars of your brand.

1. Make ethical conduct a priority. To establish a company culture that’s premised on ethical conduct, it’s essential to have buy-in from your entire staff. Integrity needs to be a priority for every member of the team, and management should practice and reinforce the definition and importance of ethical conduct on a daily basis. Make sure that integrity is prioritized both in customer relationships and in-house ones. Your team members should be treated just as well as your customers in order for your company to walk its talk.

2. Emphasize customer service. This may be obvious, but some companies overlook the importance of providing great customer service. In fact, one study found that consumers perceive customer service as a test that reveals whether or not they’re valued by a brand. To help consumers believe they’re valued, deliver on customer service.

A lot goes in to successful customer service, but these elements are especially important:

• Empower your team with the information and authority they need to effectively address customers’ issues.
• Respond quickly to customer questions and complaints.
• Provide customers with avenues for sharing feedback
• Have a plan in place to respond to feedback so customers feel heard.

3. Provide customers with the content they want. Customers are more inclined to trust your brand if it’s accurately speaking to their pain points and needs. To accomplish that, it’s imperative that your marketing team take the time to research what customers want and then put that content in front of them. When you know what kind of content your customers want to see, you can build trust in your brand by consistently meeting those expectations.

4. Be aware of your brand’s off-site reputation. In addition to managing the content that your customers receive directly from your brand, it’s important to be aware of your brand’s reputation beyond your own site. Many customers try to read expert reviews before purchasing: 86 per cent of consumers read reviews for local businesses, including 95 per cent of people aged 18-34. Furthermore, almost 91 per cent of consumers aged 18 to 34 trust online reviews at a level that’s on par with personal recommendations.

Because your brand’s off-site “presence” can make or break consumers’ trust, it’s smart to do what you can to make that reputation as great as possible. That starts with being a company that’s worthy of praise. Beyond that, it’s also worthwhile to ask happy customers to review your business, products, or services on third-party platforms and websites.

5. Connect with relevant influencers. Word-of-mouth marketing remains one of the most effective forms of building your brand and establishing trustworthiness. People trust others in their network more easily than they’ll trust a company, so you can speed up the trust-building process by connecting with influencers who have already earned trust with your target demographic. The key is to build an authentic relationship with influencers, so go for quality of relationships over quantity.

6. Make transparency a priority. It’s crucial that your brand clearly and consistently communicates its values and is transparent about how it’s living up to and embodying those values every day. In fact, previous research shows many customers value transparency over cost, and some would switch from their regular brand to another one if the latter practiced more transparency.

Here’s part of what transparency looks like: If you slip up, don’t hide it from your customers. Instead, own up to mistakes, communicate clearly about how your company intends to address issues, and then follow through on those commitments. Your customers will appreciate your honesty.

Trust Helps Companies Thrive

Earning consumers’ trust is essential for any business. Customers who trust your company are more likely to be loyal followers who continue to avail themselves of your products and services — and advocate for your brand — over the long term.

A variety of factors can enhance consumer trust, but very little is as important as this: If you want customers to trust you, do everything in your power to ensure that your team and your company practice the integrity that makes your brand worthy of trust in the first place.

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To put it simply, we bring companies and customers together.

Salesforce helps break down technology silos in your organization between departments so no matter where they are, employees in marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT share a single customer view. This enables a deeper understanding of customers on one customer relationship management (CRM) platform. We call it Salesforce Customer 360 because it gives you a 360-degree view of your customers.

Why does this help your teams? This holistic view of each customer shortens the time it takes for your company to resolve customer issues, eliminates redundancies in your communications, and allows you to personalize interactions in order to grow relationships with your customers. Our tools are also completely digital, so you can respond to customer needs quickly, from anywhere.

Got it, but what is Salesforce used for?

You may be thinking — this all makes sense in theory but what does it actually mean for my business?

It means Customer 360 gives each of your departments the tools to build stronger and more authentic relationships with your customers:

• Marketing: Tailor marketing messages to the right person at the right time on the right channel, improving lead gen, customer acquisition, and upselling opportunities

• Sales: Spend less time doing data entry and more time connecting with customers by developing and implementing a precise, repeatable sales process

• Commerce: Build simple, seamless commerce experiences that help grow revenue, engage customers, and connect commerce to the rest of the business

• Service: Deliver consistent, personalized support across every customer interaction — from the contact center to the field, and from service automation to chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI)

• IT: Build modern apps to meet employee, partner, and customer needs; increase productivity by automating key processes; and improve scale, transparency, and security with IT solutions

Digital transformation isn’t one size fits all. That’s why you can tailor Customer 360’s capabilities to your specific needs — from AI to analytics to integration to training. And beyond the technology, our global ecosystem of experts, app partners and services is always on hand, 24/7.

Sounds great — how does Salesforce work?

We help your company give your customers experiences they’ll love.

Let’s take a real example of how the beauty brand e.l.f. Cosmetics used Salesforce to give itself a business makeover.

To be successful in a digital-first world, e.l.f. Cosmetics had to make sure every customer touch point was relevant and consistent across channels. The company implemented a combo of Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Service Cloud to transform those key functions in its business, giving shoppers the best marketing, shopping, and customer service experiences possible. These three solutions are working their data magic together so company leaders have a holistic view of the shopper before and after purchase, and can quickly adapt in real time to customers’ cosmetics needs.

E.l.f. Cosmetics has seen amazing results using Customer 360:

• Ecommerce that pays — e.l.f.’s ecommerce site is first in its sector, with an impressive 55% to 65% retention rate

• Efficiencies that work — e.l.f.’s increased efficiency means the company can reassign employees from customer service case resolution to more forward-looking customer loyalty programs

“The customer is at the center of everything we do. We don’t just think about getting them to our site to make a purchase, but how do we build a relationship with them? So we use Salesforce for the full customer journey, from discovery to post-purchase, which builds that relationship and, ultimately, their advocacy.” —Ekta Choppra, Vice President of Digital, e.l.f. Cosmetics

Read the full story of e.l.f. Cosmetics’ beautiful partnership with Salesforce here.

Why the obsession with customers?

You may have noticed we’re pretty obsessed with putting customers right in the center of business. After all, we named our platform Customer 360.

Why so much customer love? Because over the last 20 years, customers’ expectations for companies have skyrocketed. A whopping 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services (Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report). Now, it’s not only about what you offer customers, but when, where, why, and how you reach them.

In this customer-powered world, the most important thing you can build as a company is trust. Today’s customers want to trust they’re getting what they need from you, when, and where they need it. They want experiences to be effortless, and they’re loyal to brands they can count on.

We know this isn’t easy for every company. According to a recent study commissioned by Forrester Consulting, business leaders are overwhelmingly challenged by information silos that make it harder to provide quality experiences for their customers.

Here are some of the challenges facing business leaders today:

• 58% strongly agree or agree that customer/prospect and account data comes from too many sources to easily make sense of it

• 58% strongly agree or agree that the lack of an enterprise view of customer/prospect data is a problem

• 56% strongly agree or agree that organizational silos negatively impact the quality of their customers’ or prospects’ experience

The research shows these issues arise because companies take on transformation initiatives in departmental silos. Over half of the study’s respondents report their CRM systems are at least somewhat fragmented across their company. While this approach may help solve a short-term business problem, it can make it harder to deliver better customer experiences down the road.

That’s where Customer 360 comes in. It was built to tackle these issues head-on by bridging team silos and building trust with customers.

Read the full Forrester Study.

To learn more about Salesforce — from our history to our culture to our people — visit our About Us page.

The post What Does Salesforce Do? appeared first on Salesforce.

As the author of books such as The Effortless Experience and The Challenger Sale, Matt was a natural partner when Salesforce recently began hosting a series of online discussions with Canadian businesses about what’s next.

Rather than simply look ahead at potential trends, though, Matt focused on the idea of “future-proofing” the customer experience (CX) a brand delivers. In other words, ensuring companies can adapt and evolve to whatever happens as COVID-19 is contained and cured.

‘Adaptive and Hopeful’

According to Matt, while the initial response to the pandemic may have put considerable pressure and strain on businesses, the tone is slowly shifting to one of optimism — even if everyone recognizes the world is going to look a lot different from now on.

“I would describe it as adaptive and hopeful,” Matt says. “I think people see that in many respects, the crisis has actually forced everyone to wrestle with things that were already bubbling below the surface.”

For example, while businesses have been recognizing the need to offer an omnichannel experience for years, the closure of many businesses has had firms looking more seriously about the ways digital technologies can help.

“Chat is a big one. Customers like it because for certain issues, they don’t want to wait on hold to talk to a rep,” he says, adding that those working within contact centres benefit as well. “It’s asynchronous —they can have concurrent chats, and a lot of things can be automated. We’re already starting to see how a sizeable percentage of inbound (requests) are being handled entirely by virtual assistants, an FAQ area or knowledge articles for a customer.”

The Customer Service Department Of The Future

Making the best use of customer service team members’ time is more critical than ever, Matt notes, given how questions and complaints have skyrocketed while consumers have been sheltering-in-place at home. At the same time, agents have not only had to adapt to working from home, but in some cases are juggling their duties while home-schooling their children.

“I don’t think we’re going to get to a world where we’ll ever see crowded call centres again, with agents sitting shoulder to shoulder,” he says, pointing out that facilities once intended for 100 employees may now only be able to accommodate 30 or 40 at a time. “Instead, there will probably be lots of shifts with agents coming in and out, sitting far apart, and the rest working from home.”

This where tools like Service Cloud can help “triage” issues and ensure the most urgent ones are assigned to the right agent, Matt says. Even as businesses reopen, companies are talking about making deeper investments in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that can make them as responsive and as efficient as possible.

To truly future-proof their CX, though, Matt recommends that a dedicated CX leader have a strong voice at the senior leadership table, breaking down walls within an organization to identify where customers might encounter friction. That’s because the quality of the experience has to be as consistent as it is pervasive.

“The customer may buy their Internet service from a sales rep but a field technician installs it, and then when the customer has an issue, they call the customer service team,” he says, using an ISP as an example. “Those are all discrete departments, but the customer thinks of it as one experience.”

Measuring CX, And Making It Even Better

This speaks to the metrics companies use to gauge CX success. Matt says businesses are not necessarily abandoning traditional measures such as customer satisfaction (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS), but they are bringing what he calls a “lens of effort reduction” to put more context around them. After all, what happens if people don’t feel like answering questions like “How did we do today?” at the end of an engagement?

“COVID is going to end the post-call survey,” Matt says. “People are stressed and focused on other things. I think the customer’s patience and tolerance for having their feedback go into a black box — where the company doesn’t respond or do anything — is not going to cut it anymore.”

Instead, he says companies that spend time to truly understand the experience they’re delivering will discover many of their questions have already been answered.

“Think about how we can leverage all the ‘found data’ around the company,” he says. “Think of all that chat data, all those recorded phone calls, all that data in Service Cloud.”

Finally, Matt says future-proofing CX comes back to being mindful about people — not just customers, but the people within a company.

“We as organizations are having to rethink who we’re hiring to engage with our customers,” he says. “How do we support and develop them, and what is the environment going to be like? What are the tools that we put in those front-line worker’s hands? It seems like an almost upside-down change in the service and support world, but I think in the end, it could look a lot better than it ever did before.”

For more from Matt Dixon, including how to create an effortless experience for your customers with your sales and service teams, visit here.

Matt Dixon

Matt Dixon is Chief Product & Research Officer of the Austin-based AI and machine learning venture, Tethr. In this capacity, he has responsibility for product strategy, product management and product marketing. A seasoned business researcher, Matt has been involved in dozens of original quantitative and qualitative research studies on topics ranging from customer experience strategy to customer service and sales effectiveness. His first book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (Penguin, November 2011), was a #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller and has sold nearly a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen languages. The Challenger Sale has won acclaim as “the most important advance in selling for many years” (SPIN Selling author Neil Rackham) and “the beginning of a wave that will take over a lot of selling organizations in the next decade.” (Business Insider). His two most recent books are The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty (Penguin, September 2013) and The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results (Penguin, September 2015). Matt is also a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review on sales, service and customer experience, having been published more than twenty times in both HBR’s print and online editions.

The post Matt Dixon On How Canadian Businesses Can Future-Proof Their Customer Experience appeared first on Salesforce.

I’ve talked to tens of thousands in the sales industry about growth and innovation over the years, written a book about it, and today I host a podcast about it. It’s my passion. And I hope I can continue to share it with you during this difficult time.

Below are my answers to the top 10 most common questions I’ve been getting from salespeople and sales managers around the world over the past few weeks. I’ll also share examples of how real Salesforce customers and sales leaders are inspiring me during this time.

1. I’m worried I won’t hit my quota. Are people still buying?

Yes, of course people are still buying, but here’s my caveat: what and how they’re buying depends on what industry you’re in. What are you selling? To whom and for what purpose? Some products are flying off the shelves, while others are nice to haves.

If you’re selling something that helps people solve for their immediate problems of survival or growth, then yes, people are buying. For example, 3M is producing 100 million respirators per month to aid in this crisis, doubling their global output to a rate of more than 1.1 billion per year. Others, however, are facing challenges, including many in the travel and hospitality industry.

At the end of the day, the world is still turning, and deals are still closing. It’s just that most, if not all, buyers are homebound. The litmus test is whether what you’re selling will put your customer in a stronger personal or professional position right now.

2. How do I keep deals moving when I can’t see, speak to, or easily connect with prospects?

I’ve had many conversations over the years with salespeople and sales executives that believe they can only sell face-to-face. They tell me their business or industry requires a relationship that can only happen in person. I’m not a fan of that point of view. Those sellers seem more interested in holding onto the way they have always sold, not thinking about what their customers want in today’s hyper-connected digital world. For those sellers, this is a really tough situation to navigate.

For those who are more comfortable with social selling — engaging virtually using video or social media platforms — and marketing and sales automation, the current reality is a bit easier to maneuver.

In both cases, it’s a salesperson’s job to make sure they add value for customers at each touch point. Keeping deals moving might be as simple as letting your customers know you’re there if they need you. Or it might mean presenting via video chat to a virtual room full of decision makers, who now work from home, and don’t have access to everything they might need to make a decision.

Maybe you can get creative and set up daily video consulting engagements to offer customers advice. Case in point: founder & CEO of PepTalkHer Meggie Palmer has curated a series of daily #PowerPepTalks that encourages people to find their superpowers and skill-up during extra downtime. All registrants are funneled into Salesforce Essentials to track and nurture leads with customized content and follow up.

Every seller is in uncharted waters when it comes to bringing in new leads and communicating with customers. So here’s my best piece of advice: let customers set the pace. Let customers set a sense of urgency (or not). Don’t push your own agenda of retiring quota. If you do, when things get back to normal, you’ll have a worse problem on your hands: a (self-inflicted) lost opportunity.

3. Without in-person meetings, how do I create a genuine connection with my customers?

Breathe in. Breathe out. There’s no need to panic. Just because you can’t see someone in person does not mean you can’t build a relationship with them. Who you are will shine through whether it’s face-to-face or over the phone. If you’ve always looked out for your customer, you will be just fine. Play the long game. Don’t get blinded by short-termism.

Yes, you have an existing pipeline. Yes, you have a quota to retire. Yes, your sales forecasts shift every day. Those things are true, but they’re not what your customers are thinking about. They’re thinking about how to keep their businesses open, manage their newly remote workforce, and scale their operations quickly.

PayPal has seen this firsthand in their recent customer service calls, with merchants asking for assistance on expanding cash flow and access to funds. As a result, the company waived certain fees and deferred some payments. Their actions are a master class on how by focusing on solving your customer’s problems, you too can create long-term connections. Read more about how this Trailblazer is leading through change.

If you haven’t talked to your customers in a while, it might not be the right time to do so. That may sound harsh, but any attempt to build the relationship now will likely come off as inauthentic and opportunistic unless you really nail the EQ aspect. Only you know what the reality is, and this isn’t the time to misrepresent or have over-confidence in your relationship.

4. How should I adjust tone and messaging for my customers? What’s the right conversation to have with them?

It all comes down to emotional intelligence, or EQ. Think carefully about the words and playbooks you use when selling and whether they’re still appropriate for this time. If in doubt, ask a friend for a gut check. Err on the side of caution.

I recently received an email from a company asking me if I wanted to buy life insurance. Yes, life insurance. As thousands of people around the world are getting sick or dying, they wanted to talk about my post-life options. Talk about tone deaf. Now, it’s not that I’m not interested, but am I interested right now in an email that read like it was business as usual? Not really.

If you are selling something that may not be appropriate during this time, hold off on the overt push. Instead, focus your message on your customers’ wellbeing. Are they okay? Is there anything you can do to help? What are their needs?

Or consider holding off on communicating in general. People are being bombarded with “we’re here for you” messages from companies they haven’t heard from in years. Consider if your message is coming out of the blue or simply isn’t helpful. If either is true, nix it.

And don’t forget to turn off your automated follow-up emails or marketing and sales campaigns that were set up prior to this pandemic. People will remember how you behaved during this time, and you don’t want to be the company that forgot to cancel their April Fool’s Day prank this year.

5. Should I focus on acquiring new pipeline or just focus on closing existing pipeline?

You’re a salesperson for a reason. You love to sell! So I wouldn’t recommend picking one over the other. However, similar to my response to question #2, you have to truly listen to what your customers and prospects are telling (or not telling) you in this environment. Follow their lead. If they respond and appear interested in continuing to discuss the deal, then that’s where you should focus your attention.

What I don’t recommend is mass emailing every contact in your database without any personalization, value, or insight. Instead, rally around your customers. Go back to your existing customers and sell more of what you’ve already sold to them. Come up with creative ways to connect. Recently, Amazon Web Services Educate began offering free webinars and office hours to help their customers build skills in remote education while schools are physically shut down. Existing customers have already proven they’re willing to do business with you. This is the time to nurture that relationship.

If that isn’t possible and you have to go hunting for new business, then you’ll have to work harder to rise above the noise. Infuse your messaging with the proper level of both empathy and value-based selling to avoid looking like you’re capitalizing on a crisis.

6. I’m a field salesperson. My job is literally to drive around and sell. What do I do now?

Imagine the car salesperson. Their entire livelihood is dependent on people showing up at the dealership, taking customers on test drives, and closing the deal, usually face-to-face. With social distancing, that can’t happen right now. So what’s a field rep to do now that they’re stuck inside? Well, embrace inside sales.

As a field rep, you know the product extremely well. That makes you a valuable asset for the nurturing and distribution of leads. In the example of a car salesperson, maybe instead of meeting with customers, you can manage the phones at the call center or respond to incoming email leads. Or maybe you can reach out to your previous customers to learn about opportunities that might be available once your business gets back to normal. Checking in on a past sale might lead you to your next.

And if you’re a sales leader, don’t forget to distribute knowledge among inside sellers and field sellers. One of our manufacturing customers is having their inside sales team train their field reps. When knowledge flows freely in your organization, everyone wins. Watch our webinar to learn about how 3M retrained their sales team from home.

7. What adjustments should I make for sales enablement and sales operations?

As your field reps now have to work from home as well, and basically become inside sellers, give them what they need. Do they lack video conferencing tools? Do they need different kinds of emails and door openers? Other kinds of content? Ask your sellers what would set them up for success during this time, and go forth.

If you find yourself not completely swamped by the task above, this might be the opportunity to inventory the processes you have in place and streamline it for everyone involved.

Sales reps spend only one-third of their time selling, according to Salesforce Research. What are the inefficiencies your sales enablement and sales operations can fix to boost that number? When we round the corner on the coronavirus (and we will), those who took the time to work on this will be in a far better position to ramp up.

8. What tools are companies using to sell from home?

Video is going to play a much larger role in everything sellers do going forward. And I’m not just talking about highly produced videos. I’m talking about the video chats with interruptions from your kids, your cat, and the gardener; live webinars with casual delivery; and the bad bandwidth pixelating it all. The future of work is going to be a lot more reliant on talking to someone through a screen and a little more forgiving of those working from home.

At Salesforce, we use a variety of video tools to collaborate, including Google Hangouts. (My colleague Sarah Franklin wrote about some other non-video collaboration tools.) I’m also on LinkedIn Live, where I use video as a way to keep up with my followers and share my insights.

And honestly, a good CRM is your best friend in times like this. (I know, I know. I’m biased.) Knowing who your customers are, reviewing dashboards on recent wins and losses, tracking leads by source – all the sales data in your CRM is now more important than ever.

9. How do I use video to sell? What are your tips for overcoming the challenges of the virtual pitch?

Personalize it. A lot of people have been reaching out to ask how I’m doing. The message that stood out the most? A short selfie video that said, “Hey Tiffani, I was thinking about you. Hope everything is good,” along with a few other things. This person could have emailed me that same message, but seeing their face made it much more encouraging.

Video is truly bridging the gap between people during this crisis. For example, SightCall is a two-way video conferencing solution for Salesforce that helps healthcare providers and patients mitigate non-essential contact. I think this pandemic might be the catalyst that fast-tracks how sales reps use video as an everyday way to communicate. We’ve already seen virtual happy hours and even Passover meals become part of our lives.

If you’re not comfortable with video, it’s time to get comfortable. I’m a firm believer of pushing your limits and trying new things. For starters, you can try sending a video message to the people you’re closest with. They’ll likely be a lot more forgiving of the awkward pauses. Once you’re more comfortable, all of my usual tips for making a good sales pitch still apply.

10. What sales skills should I brush up on while I’m at home?

Improve on what you’re not as good at. Is it lead qualification? Is it social selling? Is it writing? If you’re having trouble, talk to your manager to brainstorm ideas. There are a ton of resources out there for whatever you might be looking for.

Some places to start: Coursera, Lynda, and Udemy. Salesforce also offers this free Trailhead trail filled with concrete tips on how to build your sales career.

I get asked a lot for advice on how to become a sales thought leader. Here’s the first step: start giving advice. Then see if it actually helps people! I know I’m always checking to see if mine did.

Got more questions?

Ask me on social media. I’m answering your questions on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

For more business and leadership inspiration, check out our entire Leading Through Change series.

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1. Stand up a COVID-19 help center fast

As companies determine how to respond and navigate through this pandemic, it’s crucial they share relevant information with their customers. Customers will often have more questions than one mass email can answer. To address their concerns, consider creating a resource center or FAQ page.

How to get started:

Salesforce can help you stand up a central resource center fast. We provide businesses with free access to Community Cloud so they can quickly build a self-service help center portal for COVID-19 response. You can sign up to get more info, and don’t forget to review the Quick Start Guide.

2. Expand the capacity for self-service

Right now, customer service teams are overwhelmed by the large volume of customers reaching out for help. To ease the burden, businesses can empower customers with self-service apps that have knowledge articles and FAQs. They can also enhance digital channels with chat bots, live chat, or SMS. This will give customers an integrated and personalized experience wherever they go.

How to get started:

If you use Service Cloud, it’s easy to add on new digital channels like Chat and Einstein Bots. Both of these can be offered to your customers through portals powered by Community Cloud and External Apps. You may also use the Service SDK to surface these channels in your customer-facing apps built on any other platform.

3. Deliver a mobile-optimized experience

With the rapid shift to working from home, your customer’s day is likely filled with homeschooling children or doing chores. This means interactions happen on their mobile phone. Now is the time to optimize your mobile experience through either responsive web pages or native mobile apps.

How to get started:

Good news, if you’ve already set up a portal through Customer Community or External Apps, it is already mobile responsive. If the time is right for you to shift from a mobile responsive portal to a native mobile app experience, consider using Mobile Publisher to publish your portal as a mobile app to the App Store and Google Play. Perhaps your needs call for you to build a bespoke customer-facing application at scale? In that case, consider using a platform as a service like Heroku. Heroku allows you to build your app faster by leveraging previous work done by the broader developer community in the Heroku Elements Marketplace. Learn more about how to build apps on Heroku.

4. Make it easy for customers to access their relevant data

One of the best ways to help your customers is to give them easier access to important data like order history, case history, and profile data. Customers want to access this data online without the extra steps of calling support or logging a ticket.

How to get started:

Your CRM can push this customer data into your customer-facing applications. If you have built customer-facing apps on Heroku, you can extend your CRM data into these apps within a matter of minutes with Heroku Connect. If you’ve built customer-facing apps on another platform, you can share your CRM data by using MuleSoft or by setting up point-to-point integrations through Salesforce APIs.

5. Remove friction around authentication

During times of high stress, customers have less patience when they have to authenticate multiple times or frequently reset passwords. It’s best to remove any friction customers may experience when accessing your apps.

How to get started:

If you have a Community or External Apps portal, you can configure Salesforce Identity to enable single sign-on, social sign-on, or passwordless login with a few clicks. Salesforce Identity can also remove this friction for your customer-facing apps not built on Salesforce.

These are some of the ways your technology teams can take advantage of your existing Salesforce investment to improve customer experience and retain customers in today’s climate.

To get more tips on navigating change, read other articles in our Leading Through Change series. Find thought leadership, tips, and resources to help business leaders manage through crisis.

The post 5 Ways Technology Teams Can Deliver A Better Customer Experience Now appeared first on Salesforce.

The vision for our company has always been to help put Canadians into homes, and to help others achieve their financial freedom. While the world has changed a lot amid the recent pandemic, that vision has remained the same — we just deliver on it very differently.

Even before the spread of COVID-19 forced many organizations to close and for staff to work from home, at Alta West Capital, we had been working on an initiative that, without knowing it at the time, helped prepare us for the disruption that was to come.

About two years ago, for example, we realized that growing our business to work with bigger banks and REITs would mean developing an IT plan that would meet the most stringent cybersecurity standards. We began looking at all the ways we managed data, and how using technologies from Salesforce and others could help us comply with industry regulations.

It’s always difficult to transition from old business processes and technologies to new ones. Looking back, I liken our operational leadership to Noah building the Ark. No one could imagine the flood that was to come. It was as if Noah was putting the last spike in the Ark — we were just getting to where we needed to be — and the rain started to fall. Or, in our case, the Coronavirus outbreak began.

Pivoting To A Digital-First Business

We had already been renting space on third-party servers, but that wasn’t enough to ensure we could work from anywhere without fear of being attacked by ransomware or other security threats. Our Salesforce partner helped us find a local IT team with offices across Canada that fit the bill. Because of this, we have been able to move away from manual, time-consuming tasks to providing our team with increased visibility across our business.

All the underwriting we used to do, for instance, had been done on spreadsheets. Every single deal would be a new spreadsheet that was built out over a period of years. There were members of our team that would have little visibility into important information, and we couldn’t conduct the kind of analysis we wanted to do from one year to the next.

Using Salesforce means everyone can now see everything, from what’s in the pipeline to closing ratios.

It’s great for our company because, as the CEO, I can monitor what’s going on across different streams of the business. It means I’m not going to micro-manage anybody, but I can set up the appropriate levels of communication. That might be as simple as, ‘This is the target, this is when we’re going to achieve it, and this is your responsibility in it.”

With this foundation in place, we have been able to quickly transition from working in a regular office, to one that’s tailor-made for a distributed workforce.

Keeping Customers At The Forefront

Alta West Capital’s key customers and stakeholders include mortgage professionals, investors, and of course, borrowers. The one thing they all have in common is the need for seamless and proactive communication from our team.

While we moved quickly to put up critical information for investors and borrowers on our website, we also took additional measures. This included designating some staff to call every borrower to make sure they have all the information they needed on deferral plans and answers to other common questions.

At the same time, we were able to put a 7,000-person call list of broker contacts into Salesforce and provided Lightning dialers for our staff. As we made contact, the workflows we were able to set up within Salesforce were critical. They allow us to get a notification, for example, every time a commitment letter is issued.

Instead of information scattered everywhere, everyone has the access they need and the right people get information they can act on.

Empowering And Encouraging Employees

As a result of all this, we’re on track to have one of our best months ever. Where many of our competitors have reduced headcount or closed their doors entirely, we’ve been able to avoid layoffs.

I’ve also come to recognize that there’s a real difference in being able to pop by someone’s desk when you’re on the way to a boardroom and leading them entirely via technology. That’s why, on a day-to-day basis, we’ve assigned managers to go through everyone on the team to check in and see how they’re doing. Some are having difficulties, and others are thriving. It can really go either way, and it’s not always as you’d expect of specific individuals, either. I’ve never given as much encouragement as I do now.

This is the new normal for us. However the present situation plays out — whether it takes one week or months — our business will be irrevocably changed. But many of the changes are for the better. We have become a more well-run group than we ever were.

The post How Alta West Capital Adapted To Change By Putting Customers And Employees First appeared first on Salesforce.

According to the Salesforce Q1 Shopping Index, social traffic on tablet devices has doubled since the third quarter of last year. You can imagine shoppers using the larger screen real estate of a tablet to answer critical questions such as: “Can I get what I need?”and more importantly, “Can I get it safely?”

Retailers are responding with agility and resilience as they navigate dramatic shifts in category preferences, channel preferences, and consumer shopping behavior. Here’s what every retailer can do to address the challenges and build trust:

Improve merchandise agility and visibility

Shoppers have cleared store shelves of items like hand sanitizer, bottled water, and toilet paper. Even bread and canned goods have been scarce. In fact, a recent report from Statistics Canada revealed 63% of Canadians are stocking up on essentials.

This included bathroom tissue, which skyrocketed up 241% compared with the same time last year, and overall 16% higher grocery sales during the week of March 11 compared with the busiest shopping week of the year in 2019.

Consider the following best practices as you shift into overdrive to address sudden, unexpected shifts in product preferences:

• Ramp up efforts to replenish. As stockroom inventory dwindles, stores seek to bring in more product as fast as possible. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, the president of food distributor Sysco Canada said his firm was pivoting from restaurant and hospitality customers to to help grocers keep their inventories high. Other distributors, like Gordon Food Service and Flanagan Foodservice, are doing the same thing.

• Ensure every shopper has access to essentials. Some retailers have implemented purchase limits on high-demand items, from paper products to canned goods to baby supplies. Price gouging is another threat, and Amazon is cracking down on sellers setting outrageous price points for high-need items.

• Refactor manufacturing and supply chain. Brands such as Crocs, Canada Goose, and New Balance have taken advantage of their scale, leverage, and agility to provide safety and protective products to healthcare and other professionals on the front line.Others, such as Nobis and Knix, are donating or raising funds to procure PPE to fight COVID-19.

• Communicate your efforts to shoppers. Retailers added notices to their websites, or to their doors, to reassure customers supplies would continue to arrive and to explain any other new policies, such as Amazon’s prioritizing shipments of essentials over less-necessary items.

Adopt contactless engagement

As shoppers try to stay home, demand for delivery has skyrocketed. Instacart, Walmart Grocery, and Shipt saw 218%, 160%, and 124% increases, respectively, in average daily downloads compared to the previous month. And, generations traditionally not used to shopping this way, such as the elderly, are also getting on board with new technology.

Expand contactless payment and delivery services as well as other ways for shoppers to get groceries or other purchases without having to navigate store aisles or come into close contact with people. Indigo Books & Music, for example, has shut down its retail stores but is offering contactless curbside pickup for all online purchases.

• Provide contactless payment. Montreal-based Mobeewave recently introduced new features to its service that will allow retailers to process contactless payments by tapping a card or online wallet onto the back of an NFC-enabled mobile device. The need for special card readers or other speciality hardware can create more frustration for consumers who are already inconvenienced.

• Offer more delivery options. The CBC noted that many local Canadian farmers have taken money they would have normally allocated towards trade shows and expanded home delivery of everything from milk to fresh meat. This has meant hiring not only delivery drivers but more packers in some cases. Companies can also add delivery times to meet increased demand.

• Accelerate Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS). Shoppers who need items fast can see if they are available in a nearby store, claim them and pay online, and pick up the items at the store. Just look at Loblaw Inc., which is building an automated picking facility to support its PC Express BOPIS service. This eliminates in-person visits to multiple stores in search of a hard-to-find item and unnecessary contact at the store. Shoppers simply walk in and pick up their orders or can even take advantage of curbside delivery.

• Update customers on new options. Clearly communicate available services. Grocery stores managing online delivery services can keep customers informed and respond to inquiries quickly using Salesforce Care for Employee and Customer Support.

Set new policies to ensure shopper — and employee — safety

The unprecedented threat to health and safety calls for never-before-needed measures in brick-and-mortar stores. To protect the most vulnerable, consider the following practices:

• Institute specific shopping times for the elderly or immunocompromised. Welcome these individuals in when the store first opens in the morning, when it is cleanest and fully stocked.

• Implement safety protocols. Limit the number of people in the store at one time and instruct shoppers to remain six feet apart. Some grocery stores have put tape on the ground to mark where shoppers should stand while waiting to enter or check out.

• Step up cleaning efforts. Modify open hours to facilitate regular deep cleaning. Install hand sanitizer dispensers throughout the store and encourage shoppers and employees to use them.

Respond with empathy and creativity

Grocery and pharmacy workers have become frontline heroes in this pandemic, especially those who come into contact with the public, such as cashiers and stockers. Warehouse workers also put their health on the line. Leaders can support them in multiple ways:

• Increase compensation for hourly employees. Acknowledge their hard work, and their risk of exposure, with a tangible raise in pay. Sobeys, for instance, has launched what it calls its Heroes Pay Program, which will provide an extra $50 a week to all employees. Those working more than 20 hours a week will get a $2 per hour premium.

• Prioritize worker health and safety. Increase the cleaning cadence for warehouses and other workspaces and provide protective equipment if possible. Bolster leave policies to encourage sick workers to stay home and fully recover. Learn other ways to enhance employee wellbeing with Camp B-Well (Trailhead).

• Be transparent as your response evolves. Leverage Quip to establish a crisis strategy and craft templates for communications. Share changes in policy to all stakeholders and encourage feedback. H-E-B established a coronavirus hotline for employees in need of information or assistance.

• Pledge no layoffs like RBC and Chubb Insurance. Give employees peace of mind by committing to no significant layoffs for 90 days for salaried, non-salaried, and hourly employees alike, in order to show dedication to your workforce.

Next steps and resources

These are challenging times for the retail industry. While digital has seen very healthy growth in the first quarter, it won’t come close to offsetting the seismic drop in physical foot traffic. Those leaders who adapt to the challenges created by the health crisis are attracting new customers and cementing lifelong relationships. Learn more about the Salesforce Care Solution, which helps you communicate with customers and employees directly or on social media.

Our Leading Through Change series provides thought leadership, tips, and resources to help business leaders manage through crisis. Check out some of our most recent articles:

• Find out how retailers are connecting with digital-only customers

• Get five tips to update your site faster in a time of crisis

• See five ways we’re helping our employees navigate work now

For more Leading Through Change, click here.

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Content agility in action

Commerce companies are doing an amazing job of delivering needed content to customers.

For example, the cosmetics retailer Lush provides prominent links to COVID-19 information on its homepage. Plus, it connects customers with a handwashing how-to article from its homepage. The article even includes an overview of how soap works.

Clothing retailer Hot Topic uses a homepage banner to link to COVID-19 FAQs about store closings, refunds, and more. Digging into product pages, you’ll find available sizes along with the number of times people purchased hot items. For example, this Animal Crossing hoodie is selling fast according to the site. Retailer Madewell takes a similar approach, with store closure information along with shipping and return links featured on its homepage. Customers used to an in-person experience get fast information about the retailer’s online shopping experience.

Content workflows under new pressure

Behind the scenes, many commerce teams that contribute content are struggling to keep up. Marketers, PR, and merchandisers all have more to share than ever. And executive approvers have more to review. They’re facing an unprecedented need to keep customers connected to the latest product, shipping, and return information.

Getting content published – even a straightforward return policy update – can take many steps and approvals. During a time of crisis, are you trying to carry out too many steps at a faster pace than ever before? Streamline some of the CMS-based processes you use to create and share content, especially product and other customer-facing content. Use these five tips as a starting point:

1. Empower the right people to update content

The people who create content should be able to update it. Train them to update content themselves with your CMS, and align approvals and workflows to support them. Cut back on the number of people who need to approve minor changes. Do you have a copyeditor proof the content on your staging site before going live? Keep that — it adds value by catching errors without taking much time.

2. Simplify product page design and update workflows

Look at your product page design and update workflows. You might find it’s a multi-stage back-and-forth between merchandisers and frontend developers. Look for opportunities to remove handoffs. If possible, let product teams update templated pages or page components themselves in the CMS.

3. Reuse content across channels

Your CMS may support publication to multiple channels, and you may not be taking full advantage of that capability. Being able to reuse content like banners across your storefront and in emails can be a huge time-saver, especially when you need to communicate with customers quickly.

4. Keep employee-facing content up to date

Your team needs to keep up with the latest developments too. That means empowering your HR and training teams to update content themselves. This example from NOW TV shows how simplifying training content creation processes boost internal engagement.

5. Share timely stories and expertise that’s relevant to your customers

As Party City does in this collection of at-home family fun ideas, you may want to share information that’s not transaction-related. Your blog is the perfect place to do that, especially if you’ve trained the right people to update content. Consider giving in-store staff who are now at home an online tutorial in blog writing. Your empowered content editors can help polish and publish insights from people eager to keep contributing from home.

Overcoming too much CMS complexity

If your content flows through more than one CMS or requires a frontend developer to publish, you might be thinking the above steps don’t apply. They do – you just might need to tweak them to your systems and capabilities. Just reducing one approval cycle or increasing the reuse of content (even if you have to cut and paste between systems) can save days.

Content is the conversation you’re having with customers. Understanding your CMS can help you make the conversion smoother and allow updates to happen in near real-time.

Do you want to learn more about how CMS technology evolved? Read What Is a CMS?

To get more tips on navigating change, read other articles in our Leading Through Change series. Find thought leadership, tips, and resources to help business leaders manage through crisis.

• Connect with your customers better with a crisis communication plan

• Get insight into how to keep your website up and running

• See what you can do in one hour to improve your self-service

• Weather uncertainty with a reimagined digital customer experience

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