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.

Self-service is a powerful tool for customers during a time of crisis, as they look for quick answers to common questions. To ensure your self-service channels make the biggest impact, what can you do quickly — even in just one hour — before your day begins?

Identify frequently asked questions

Taking a few minutes to connect with your team will help you understand the most common customer questions to address in your help center.

1. Host a daily standup

Even if it’s just for 10 minutes, meeting with your team gets everybody on the same page. Ask agents for commonly asked customer questions they receive across all channels, during the crisis. This includes questions via the call center and how they resolve them.

2. Create a collaboration document

Throughout the course of the day, encourage agents to use simple collaboration tools they can update on the fly with frequent customer requests related to the crisis. With a single source of truth, agents can record how they resolved their cases to help colleagues with similar future cases.

3. Update your help center

Use your list of frequently asked questions as a cue to create content on your help center, such as updates on delayed orders or how to get a refund for a service. If it makes sense for your organization, consider a dedicated section on your help center with featured articles specific to the crisis. For example, Pearson updated the home page on their support site with information about delays due to COVID-19, directing people to their self-service options.

Make simple updates to your messaging

Reviewing and, where necessary, adding or updating messaging on your self-service channels assures customers your organization is sensitive to what they are going through.

1. Put relevant customer support information front and center

Consider creating a banner that appears at the top of your home page with specific instructions or with a direct link to your help center. Services like DoorDash have a clear message to let customers know there may be long wait times on orders. If you have a customer portal, personalize the banner message at the top of the page as well.

And, offer the option for customers to easily opt-in to receive real-time notifications or updates, such as the timing of a late delivery or payment. For example, DoorDash offers customers to opt-in for no contact delivery.

2. Update your chatbot’s welcome message

If you keep your bot’s general welcome message, it may feel out of touch to customers. Re-evaluate the first message that appears when a customer reaches out. Consider updating or adding a few words that are empathic to the current situation and address common requests, such as how to make a cancellation and receive updates related to COVID-19.

3. Create an all-encompassing knowledge article

Keep agents aware of new and existing protocols during the crisis and other internal changes with a knowledge article. Develop an externally-facing version, as well, to keep customers informed.

Find ways to streamline workflows

Simplifying processes and making it easier to find information goes a long way for customers, and frees up agents from high-volume cases.

1. Create a channel menu on your site

In a time of crisis, customers don’t want to take time to search for a contact page. With a simple widget or code snippet, you can integrate a fixed channel menu on your help center or website. This surfaces all available support channels to customers or can direct them to a web-to-case input form, a community, or a knowledge base.

2. Route cases with chatbots

Review your data to find specific keywords that keep coming in via your chatbots. For easy answers, make sure you have an FAQ the chatbot can use to answer questions. For more sensitive topics, have your chatbot immediately offer to transfer to an agent.

3. Create guided processes

In your customer portal, you can automate specific processes to help customers do them on their own (and alleviate agents from high-volume calls). By integrating a workflow on your end, such as canceling an order, the automation process appears on their screen and walks customers through each step.

With just a few simple updates, you can ensure your self-service channels are working hard to handle the high contact volume during this unprecedented time.

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.

• Here are five ways we help our employees navigate work now

• See how you can maintain customer relationships when you can’t meet in person

• You need to have a crisis comms plan in place

The post What You Can Do In One Hour to Enhance Your Self-Service appeared first on Salesforce.

They might say things like, “Customer Service Is Not A Department. It’s Everyone’s Job,” or “Customer Service Is Not A Single Act. It’s A Practice That’s Performed Every Day.”

These are great slogans to remind yourself of the importance of what you do. If they become so familiar you no longer really look at them, however, they don’t provide a lot of value. Your customer service dashboard faces the same fate if it’s not set up the right way from the very beginning.

Like any other business application, dashboards can offer an incredible number of benefits to employees. This includes productivity, collaboration, and a better experience for customers, which is ultimately what service is all about.

Also like other business applications, though, customer service dashboards can bury the information that employees need to see the most. Or they are set up in such a way that employees get frustrated and simply try to work around them.

This defeats the entire point of dashboards, and also makes it difficult for managers to coach them effectively. After all, some of what might appear in a customer service dashboard will relate directly to an individual agent’s or the team’s performance in terms of volume of issues resolved. If you’re not making the dashboard a part of your process, what the dashboard shows in terms of performance may be poor.

In the early days of dashboards, of course, many organizations were making a pretty big shift from providing key data points to service agents on paper to managing customer data in real-time. In many cases, firms might not have known exactly what needed to be displayed on the front end.

There might still be some unique business needs you need to keep in mind as you set up a customer service dashboard, but a few of the following activities will guide you towards a best practice approach:

1. Jump ahead to the team or senior leadership meeting

Rather than treat a customer service dashboard as a blank slate, it might make sense to imagine what will happen around the table the next time everyone’s gathered to discuss current priorities and trends. Some of the questions to think about include:

• What could be the leading or lagging indicators of how a common service issue is being addressed across our customer base? Look for not only the volume of queries but mean time to resolution, the kind of resources required, and so on.
• What kind of analysis won’t be possible by a human being in real time? Managers might get asked about patterns or details around service issues they can’t answer off the top of their head. Same goes for agents. What might the dashboard track or monitor that they could easily call up when required?
• What might we need to show on a graph, chart or in a PowerPoint presentation? Dashboards should assist in reporting in the simplest way possible. Don’t wait for your CEO or leadership team to ask for a visualization you can’t deliver.

2. Weave in your top sales and marketing KPIs

Customer service should never be a silo.

While you’ll have a natural disposition towards offering the kind of information in a dashboard that relates directly to troubleshooting and answering questions, think as holistically as possible.

What’s the point of strong customer service, for instance, if it’s not to help reduce churn or turnover of customers? When churn rises, it makes life much harder for sales and marketing teams. A more positive way to look at it might be loyalty or retention rates the team is managing to achieve. This is a key performance indicator (KPI) that’s relevant to the entire organization.

Similarly, the service team — and the organization as a whole — could find a lot of insight by looking at service interactions by channel. If a customer’s primary engagement with marketing comes through something like social, for instance, and they also reach out for support via social, you’re getting a strong message about the kind of experience or journey they’ll want to take with you moving forward.

3. Tease out (and track) tiers of service experience

Most firms started out with a customer service strategy based entirely on employing agents to deal with everything that came the company’s way. Not anymore.

The availability of digital tools like chatbots and online customer communities has gone a long way towards empowering customers to pursue self-service activities or get the most common issues addressed in a rapid, automated fashion. Agents should therefore be able to focus on the more complex or more serious issues that affect your customers.

A great customer service dashboard should help firms get a better view into how much of their service is happening via their highly-trained agents versus self-service tools. It’s the only way you’ll be able to properly allocate resources for customer service as your organization grows.

Conclusion: Don’t set it and forget it

If you’ve thought through all the areas we’ve touched on above, it might be nice to sit back and just let agents enjoy the customer service dashboard in all its glory.

In practice, dashboards should be reviewed on a consistent basis, and not only to make sure agents are using them. Dashboards may need to be tweaked as the company moves into new product and service areas, new geographies or vertical markets. Senior leadership may also be placing a greater emphasis on certain KPIs depending on their business objectives. The customer service dashboard should reflect that.

Be proactive in how you develop your customer service dashboard, in other words. No matter what it displays, it should give every team member a big picture perspective on what’s needed to best help customers and the company, while also providing data that empowers them to do so.

The post How To Set Up Your Customer Service Dashboard appeared first on Salesforce.

Those two sentences are chock-full of phrases that spell doom for any company that wants to excel in customer service, according the experts. They are culled from a recent blog post on Forbes that tried to hone in on the worst things people working in call centres or other channels can say to clients coming to them with a problem.

There are so many ways to make an issue worse in a customer service situation that some firms might feel tongue-tied, but of course saying nothing is not an option. In fact, with the rise of channels like social media and online customer communities, there are many more avenues where customers expect a response – provided it’s worded properly. These are just a few guidelines on how to talk in a way they’ll want to listen.

“Sorry you’re having this issue.”

People want acknowledgement that you, as a representative of your firm, recognize the damage certain problems have on the relationship they’ve built with a particular firm. They also want to know you’re taking ownership of it. Be direct but brief enough that the response is conveyed genuinely no matter whether you’re interacting via phone call, chat session, social media or text message.

“I have your information right here.”

Customers do not want to be put in a scenario where a customer service rep has to play detective and get up to speed on a situation. That’s why companies using CRM, marketing automation software and customer service apps have a built-in advantage in that they can collect and manage customer information to have immediate access to the most relevant details.

“Here’s what we can do right now.”

Think about the way data and analytics are being used by companies to try and see into the future and improve the way they market and sell products and services. Customers expect the same level of insight – and action – when they call in for support after those products and services have been purchased. It’s essential that customer service teams use data strategically to identify repeatable processes to fix common problems, or at least route customers more quickly to people or other resources that can address their questions or complaints.

“I just want to make sure you know . . .”

Avoid language that sounds like the burden for learning certain details about a product, service or support process falls on the customer, rather than on you. Point them to the easiest channels to access this information, particularly if there are options for mobile devices, which is probably their most-used channel in many cases.

“Would this work?”

Unfortunately, some products go out of stock, or service options don’t exist in perpetuity. Or there’s simply a lack of information to completely take care of everything the customer brings forward. The next best thing is to give them alternatives to show you’re invested in their success and committing to doing whatever you can. The worst that can happen is you get more information about what won’t work, and how you might tailor other offerings.

“What’s the best way for us to follow up with you?”

A customer service problem that starts on Twitter may be better addressed by directing customers to a live agent on a phone. In other cases, there might be self-service capabilities by encouraging customers to work with an online community of some kind. What’s critical is that any next steps or supplementary information be conveyed in the channel that makes the most sense (or is easiest) for the customer, not the firm resolving the issue.

“Let me know if I can help with anything else!”

Although customers don’t want to be subjected to the third degree when they have a problem or complaint, they’ll give more information or supply additional details if they think they’re being heard and dealt with in a professional and conscientious manner. Never miss an opportunity to turn problem resolution into the next phase of nurturing a stronger customer relationship. That’s the best way to ensure the vocabulary they use to talk about your firm is the kind you want as well.

Learn how Salesforce’s Service Cloud customer service software gives you faster, smarter customer support or how Desk.com’s all-in-one customer support app can empower small businesses with an out-of-the-box help desk solution. You can also see what makes the best service organizations successful in Salesforce’s free eBook:

The post 7 Key Phrases Your Customer Service Vocabulary Must Contain appeared first on Salesforce.

Yet the best documentation needs to go beyond merely recording the entire session. It means thinking carefully about the interaction and even making notes that offer a degree of analysis. That’s the whole point, really: to capture best practices in customer service as they become evident through real-time problem-solving.

What makes it harder now, of course, is that the ubiquitous nature of technology has given customers so many more touchpoints than ever before. This includes calls from their mobile devices like smartphones, social media services, apps and perhaps soon even undreamed-of interactions via the Internet of Things.

This makes documentation even more important because, if it’s done the right way, some of the key principles should be applicable across many of the same touchpoints. Consider the following:

Map The Most Common Service Journeys

In B2B firms, we often talk about the “buyer journey,” or the sequence of steps that take them from awareness of a product or service to considering a purchase and finally making a transaction. In many SMBs there may be something similar going on when customers reach out for help. This could be the kind of channel they use, the average response time across that channel, the team members that may need to be consulted or to whom a customer must be routed, and finally the overall time to resolution and typical next steps.

In most cases there will not be one single customer service journey, but there probably won’t be an infinite series of variations, either. Take time to talk to agents as a team about what seem to be the routines and ensure you not only are well resourced to support those journeys, but make sure there aren’t ways to make them faster, simpler or better journeys.

Segment The Service Issues Related To Your Most Valuable Customers

Each customer should be entitled to the best service possible, but businesses sometimes live or die based on how well they support their most loyal customers. That’s one the best reasons to use tools like CRM, because they make it easy to quantify those who have placed repeat orders to continue to become valuable in some way. Their expectations may rise in parallel with the volume of business they conduct over time, so consider creating a customer service strategy or allocating resources specific to reducing any churn in this isolated group.

Turn Service Solutions Into Market Research Opportunities

Making customers’ lives easier may require learning more about them, beyond the products and services they have bought in the past. What data can you gather through these interactions about their needs, wants and experiences with your current offerings? How might this influence the way you try to nurture your relationship once their problem has been resolved? Think of the questions that will help get at this data, ensure agents note it accordingly and then get it in your CRM.

Identify (And Nurture) Your Top ‘Documentors’

Just like in sales and marketing departments, there are often customer service stars that rise to a level well above the best of their team members. These are the people who are given the toughest problems to resolve, because you know they can do it with speed and professionalism. Chances are they are also among the best at capturing key learnings from each interaction. Singling out these individuals not only for their performance but their prowess in documentation is a great way to move beyond traditional top-down approaches to training.

Document The Channels That Should be Prioritized For Service

Social media could be a place where some complaints or questions first emerge, but that’s not necessarily the place where they’ve optimally resolved. Make sure the team is documenting how they move such cases to a phone call, an email exchange or some other channel. Look at which channels offer the best return, both in terms of fast resolution but overall customer satisfaction. This will help you determine which channels to emphasize to customers in your after-sale marketing activities.

You don’t have to turn documentation into something the size of a book, but if everyone takes enough notes, it will be clear how to evolve customer service from a necessary chore to a mechanism for growing your business.

Learn more about Salesforce’s customer service solutions or what makes the best service organizations successful in Salesforce’s free eBook:

The post A Better Approach To Documenting Your Customer Service Process appeared first on Salesforce.

In large organizations with fully-staffed call centres, of course, it’s easier for CEOs or senior managers to leave customer service problems to specific teams and only have them report in on high-level trends. Running an SMB, on the other hand, often means diving in directly to put out fires, particularly when they involve some of your most long-standing and valuable customers.

This is where the rise of mobile computing dovetails perfectly with the needs of a modern SMB owner. Here’s why more organizations will soon be using mobile apps as part of their customer service strategy, and what it will mean for their day-to-day operations.

Why The Time For Managing Customer Service Via Mobile App Has Come

According to a survey conducted by Clutch, a Washington, DC-based research firm, only 15 per cent of small businesses have a mobile app today, and 40 per cent are hesitant to make their own due to uncertainty about the return on such investments. Unless they are in the tech sector or have access to developers, it may not feasible to keep apps up-to-date. In fact, the Clutch survey showed that 33 per cent of apps for small businesses were built in 2014. And these were most likely customer-facing mobile apps, rather than apps SMB owners and teams would use themselves.

This is not unlike the early days of web sites, when SMBs didn’t have the resources or know-how to create their own portals. Now there are inexpensive and easy-to-use templates to handle much of the design work, and hosting providers who can take care of the major technical details. For example, Salesforce Platform is a one-stop shop for building, running, managing, and optimizing apps using the same technology and expertise that fuels Salesforce’s success. Salesforce Platform has everything a business needs to build beautiful, engaging apps that transform the customer experience. Managing customer service issues is a perfect test case for this.

A Typical Customer Service Management-On-The-Go Scenario

Many customers already offer email addresses in addition to phone numbers for customer support issues today, but that’s just a starting point. This is just one example of a timeline that an SMB owner could expect once they get up and running with a customer service management app that provides many other options:

9:00 am: Check one — and only one “universal inbox” to see what customer service issues have come in via email, phone, social media such as Twitter or Facebook, or chat sessions. Look for what’s unresolved and act or delegate accordingly.

11:00 am: In between meetings, look for trends around what channels your customers are primarily using to reach out for support. Consider how you’ll reallocate marketing and other resources to ensure you have FAQs and similar materials easily available to provide self-service options for customers wherever possible.

1:00 pm: Use the reporting tools in your mobile app to identify the members on your team who seem more proficient in resolving particular inquiries and make sure the most serious issues get routed to them if you’re not able to handle them yourself.

3:00 pm: As business hours start to run out, encourage the use pre-written responses or macros to speed up the resolution of repetitive customer support issues and make sure the team is tying into your CRM to sort cases in a way that priorities your biggest spenders.

5:00 pm: Review the day and look for trends and patterns in your customer support data. What can be tweaked in your sales process, marketing process, or even the design or your products and services to minimize customer service issues before they come up again?

The Real Way To Think About Customer Service Management App ROI

If this sounds like a lot of time to be spending on customer service, consider a few important factors:

1. Customer service management via a mobile app is about getting the work done while developing a longer-term strategy. It takes SMB owners out of the weeds in order to look at over-arching problems they can resolve over time.
2. The steps above could be simple, quick check-ins on your smartphone or tablet compared with lengthy phone calls or meetings. You’ll be accomplishing other things as you’re moving around the office, outside the office or commuting.
3. The more you manage customer support via a mobile app, the better you’ll be able to identify other tasks and processes that could be optimized for environments other than a cubicle or office.

Ready for more customer service insights? Check out Salesforce’s free e-book:

The post A Day In The Life Of Managing Customer Service From An App appeared first on Salesforce.

This is obviously not how Canadian SMBs want to approach customer service, and fortunately there are a number of ways to manage it in a far more effective fashion. A good place to start might be with Salesforce’s 2015 State of Service report , which polled more than 1,900 leaders around the world to identify the top trends. Some of these may sound like the kind of things only the largest companies could do, but here’s a breakdown of what the trends mean in layman’s terms and how even SMBs can take advantage of them.

Omni-Channel

Companies have realized for a few years now that not all customers hear about their products by walking into the store. That’s why marketers have been increasingly trying to generate demand online, targeting mobile devices, via social media and more. Those same channels that inform them about the value of products and services are also great mechanisms for helping them connect with companies and address their questions or concerns. According to a recent study by industry association CMO Club, 55 per cent of companies still aren’t developing an omni-channel strategy, so there’s plenty of time to catch up.

Here’s your omni-channel health check:

• Do you have a digital presence on all the platforms your customers may choose to interact with you?
• Is it clear that those channels can be used as a customer service touchpoint?
• What kind of service-level guarantees can you reasonably expect to offer – ie., can you promise you’ll respond to a question or issue on social media before the end of business day?

Empowered Agents

We’ve all been on the other end of the line, calling a company with a problem or complaint and quickly realizing that the person we’ve phoned doesn’t know enough about the product or service and the best way to escalate the issue. In fact, a research firm called Mattersight just released a study that showed only 28 per cent of customers call customer service as their first attempt to solve a problem.

Excellence in customer service means doing the upfront work necessary to turn that attitude around. Even if you’re an SMB that doesn’t operate a call centre, there’s a lot you can do to make sure your “agents” (which might be yourself or a few key coworkers) are armed with the best resources.

Here’s your empowered agents health check:

• Look through any data you’re able to collect through customer service technology. What are the most common issues, and what can you do to reduce the reasons for people calling in?
• How can you make it easier for customers to find you? A phone number isn’t helpful if it goes straight to voice mail, and emails that sit in an inbox just generate more frustration. Think about how mobile tools can bring information to you wherever you are so you and your team can react in real time.
• Keep your customers’ emotional needs top of mind. There’s no better way to do that than by nurturing strong relationships on an ongoing basis via leveraging data from CRM and keeping in touch through social media and other means.

Proactive Service

No one wants to be constantly putting out fires, but moving away from a reactive approach to customer service may have even greater benefits than Canadian SMBs imagine. Research from Deloitte, for example, suggests that 57 per cent of employees who believe they work at a ‘purpose-driven’ company are engaged and report a high level of job satisfaction, compared to just 23 per cent of those who don’t. You could define “purpose-driven” in many different ways, but it’s really about having clear goals and measuring against them as often as possible.

Here’s your proactive service health check:

• What tools and technologies are in place to collect, store and manage information on customer service issues as they happen?
• How easily can you identify common patterns about customer service issues. How “predictive” are your customers?
• What means, if any, do you have to share information that could predict customer service issues with your team?

Self-Service

Customers aren’t born complainers. In fact, they may be happiest when they can take charge of a problem on their own, provided they have the access and capabilities to do do. Research firm Gartner suggests that in only five years, customer will manage 85 per cent of their relationship with companies in ways that don’t involve human beings at all.

Here’s your proactive service health check:

• What kind of portals, apps or other resources could provide a baseline understanding of how to resolve simple and common service issues to the average customer
• What kind of security needs to be in place to ensure they can resolve a problem rather than making it worse?
• How can you best integrate self-service options with a quick and easy way to get to a real person if customers encounter difficulties can need more help?

Learn more about these four trends and the impact they’ll have in the coming year by downloading the 2015 State of Service Report, a free eBook from Salesforce:

The post Take A Customer Service ‘Health Check’ Across These 4 Critical Areas appeared first on Salesforce.

It’s a question worth asking yourself because, whether you’re connecting with clients offline or online, it has a direct impact on your bottom line.

Even with affordable tech-driven alternatives, only one in 10 business executives have cut down on business travel and 88 per cent believe closing the deal is best done face-to-face.

Time and time again, offline in-person interactions have proven to be the most powerful tool in driving lead conversions and nurturing clients.

Yet, while we’d all like to meet with leads in-person in every step of the sales journey, it’s largely a logistical impossibility.

So what’s the solution?

At TheRedPin, we found that it’s personalization. The new IT word in digital marketing, personalization can drive a 19 per cent boost in online sales.

A personalized online experience that closely mirrors offline interactions can cultivate greater customer-brand loyalty while also helping show customers you care in those difficult situations like complaints

In this post, we’re going to show you how to bring a more human touch to your online interactions with clients with our six tips that include showing:

• A new way to send emails that close higher
• How to respond to clients in less than five minutes
• A way to get clients to call you first
• How to transform your FAQ page into a face-to face-conversation.

Six creative solutions for a more personalized online customer experience

1. Incorporate personalized videos recordings into your email

Social media marketers have been vocal about the benefits of incorporating videos into Twitter and Facebook campaigns, pointing to the fact videos drives up the number of shares and views.

Recent studies have shown that email marketing can reap the same benefits and emails that featured personalized video recordings can lead to a huge jump in conversions.

Just how much of a jump?

An app that allowed for personalized video recording to be sent via email boosted open rates by 60 per cent and rates by 20 per cent. Another study found that subject lines that merely mentioned a personalized video saw open rates jump by 272 per cent.

It’s important to note, these video are personalized. It’s less about embedding a generic “About Us” video and more about opting for genuine methods of communication.

With a quick tap of a button on your smartphone (a green screen can add a nice touch too), you can record from the convenience of your office and bring a personal touch to what is arguably the least personal, most automated step in your sales funnel—the sales email.

Whether the video is used as a means to quickly introduce your business to a new potential leads or to send a personalized welcome aboard—the merits are clear.

Ditch text-based emails and use applications (e.g. Rukus or Clearside) that allow for personalized recorded videos to be embedded in emails

2. Get back to your clients in minutes

Sometimes, the personal touch is less about adding a human face and more about getting back to your clients as soon as they reach out to you.

That’s where live chat comes in.

By integrating the option for people browsing your site to reach out and receive instant feedback in real time, you let clients know that you’re always there for them.

Live chat options have grown particularly popular among millennials, as a recent survey found 35 per cent of Gen Y look to live chat options. Baby boomers also showed an affinity towards live chat, as 29 per cent said they would use it, particularly in customer service related issues.

Getting back to your client in record time is arguably among the best strategies in driving up conversion rates.

Research has shows that businesses that get in contact with a lead within the first five minutes are 100 times more likely to successfully convert a lead versus those contacted after 30 minutes.

Some companies, such as Schuh, have even integrated live video chat – where clients can actually see employees. It’s key to avoid turning a tool intended to help into a pop-up that pesters in order just to sell. Have the live chat option appear on the side with a visible button that allows clients to access when needed.

3. Turn your call-to-action into a clickable phone number

Today, people spend more time browsing the internet on their mobile devices than they do on their conventional computers. Nearly 3 hours of peoples’ days are used browsing over a smartphone or tablet versus two and a half hours on a computer.

So far the business exec on the go who arrives on your landing page or website on his or her phone, make it easy for them to contact you. Turn your call to action from a generic form to a clickable phone number that gets them in direct contact with a sales person.

A study found that 52 per cent of mobile visitors voiced that being able to call and talk on the phone was important during their research phase. Another case study found that adding a single click to call CTA led to a 200 per cent increase in call to conversion rate.

Win over mobile visitors by making it easy for them to call you. Include your phone number with the option to directly click to call

4. Random act of kindness

In the digital world, nothing gets more personal than a handwritten note. With that in mind, taking the extra step and sending them out to a client can lead to a lasting impression – even on C-Level execs high up on the corporate ladder.

Going the extra mile takes many forms. Even acknowledging something of personal significance that was brought up in gest during a meeting can cultivate a stronger relationship with potential leads.

When Zappos sent flowers to a customer who wasn’t able to return a pair of shoes due to her mother passing away, the company made crossed a landmark in business-client relations.

It’s important to get personal. Don’t give away free tickets to a baseball game to someone who’s a through-and-through soccer fan.

MailLift is a company that can personally craft hand-written notes to your clients on your behalf.

5. Stepping up your testimonials page

Nothing is more persuasive or builds stronger credibility for your business than a quality testimonial page.

So what separates a good testimonial page from a great one? Videos.

Compared to text, where readers only absorb 10 per cent of the information, videos are far more digestible—viewers retain as much as 95 per cent of a message. It also adds a far more personal angle as people can see the actual face of the person vying for your business. People also trust videos more than text-based testimonials.

Videos are largely preferred by almost everyone, as a recent Forbes study found that 59 per cent of executives would rather watch a video rather than read text.

Video testimonials don’t have to be expensive high-production. Camera with a green screen and basic editing tools are enough.

6. Turn your FAQ Page into a face-to-face conversation

For common questions that are difficult to address over text on a FAQ page, consider recording a video to address those exact questions.

This can prove to be a particularly powerful for technical question that require more explanation.

The next best thing from meeting a client in-person, you can also incorporate these videos into email campaigns. Far from a costly venture, all you need is basic camera and a plain background or a green screen.

There’s little debating that face-to-face meetings are the best way to close a deal with a potential lead. But with clients often based halfway across the world and with hundreds if not thousands of potential leads in your CRM, following up in person is a logical nightmare.

As is often the case, the solution lies somewhere in the middle and involves emulating offline interactions into a digital medium—bringing the online experience as close to a personalized offline interaction as possible.

To learn how to deliver customer service that’s more personalized, smarter and faster than ever, download Salesforce’s free eBook:

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