Why Salesforce is Essential in Your Customer Experience Improvement Plan

While there have certainly been incidents in the recent past that have made us rethink the phrase "The customer is always right," the reality is that customer experience is an essential element to a business's success.

And while few would argue that premise is true, it also doesn't provide the hard data of what improved customer experience can do for your business. Several companies have quantified it, however. A study done by Dimension Data saw gains with improved customer experience - 92% of companies that improved their customer experience saw an increase in customer loyalty, 84% of those who responded saw an uplift in revenue, and 79% saw cost savings as a result.

Improved CX can't be done by just waving a wand, though. It takes a considered and well-planned process to see measurable results. Training and a top-down approach are essential, but so is having the right tools.

This is where Salesforce comes in. It's a crucial tool for businesses looking to take their customer experience to the next level. Whether an ecommerce merchant, a B2B manufacturer or a healthcare provider, Salesforce has a set of tools that will enable your teams to delight your customers.

6 Ways SFDC Supports CX Improvement

Understand the Customer

One of the key artifacts that both marketing and product managers use to help drive results are personas or avatars. These are idealized personalities and demographic sketches of your core customers. They are not all-encompassing but representative of your prospective customers so that marketing, products, and services can be tailored to speak to their language and address their pain points.

You likely already developed have personas using surveys and secondary research methods. Salesforce offers the opportunity to improve those sketches to bring them more in line with your core audience and your most important customers. Using existing customer information, you can refine the data in your personas to more accurately represent your potential clients.

Not only will you know your customers better through this, but you'll also have real-world information on what your customer journey looks like. Digging into your SFDC data, you can gain greater insight into the inflection points across the buyer's path and what the experience looks like for them after purchase. From there, you can review your existing customer success processes to understand better and anticipate customer needs - before they even materialize.

Empowering the Employee to Help

There are few things more frustrating than talking to customer service and realizing they have no visibility into your previous actions with the company or no autonomy to make important decisions to resolve a problem.

Salesforce overcomes these issues. To start, Agent Workspace within Service Cloud provides seamless access to a customer's account and history through a single windowpane into the data. This means less context switching for the agent and less waiting for the customer. This upstream acceleration of customer support also improves downstream customer experience, where additional customers are on hold for shorter periods, even during heavy call periods.

Additionally, automated triggers for requests can accelerate various customer service activities. For instance, if an agent submits a request for a rebate or credit to a customer, Salesforce can automate the submission and approval process for requests under a certain amount. Agents can inform customers immediately that the credit is approved, yet the organization can maintain proper and consistent approval workflows with traceable paper trails.

Enable Feedback

Customer experience improvements are more effective if they address the issues that customers are actually facing. Indeed, Salesforce's own State of the Connected Customer Report from 2020 found that 73% of customers expect a business to understand their needs. It can be challenging to know what those needs are, but there is one sure way to find out - ask the customer.

Two years ago, Salesforce launched a suite of tools and surveys intended to facilitate feedback capture. Feedback Management provides organizations with the ability to collect feedback in real-time that a business can use to drive their customer experience improvement plan. Feedback can be collected at specific points of interaction with customers, and the solution has built-in analytics tools to deep dive into what your customers say they are looking for.

Use AI to Improve Interactions and Offer Self-Service

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer only science fiction. Salesforce has brought this advanced technology to businesses of nearly every size with its Einstein offerings. It's possible to drive massive improvements in customer experience with the various features offered by Einstein.

Self-service is one of the leading uses of AI for customer experience improvements. For instance, smart chatbots can quickly help customers find solutions to their questions or issues without ever speaking with a customer service agent. These bots also gather pertinent data throughout their conversations with customers. Even if intervention by a human is needed, the agent will have all of the data available to them without needing to ask the customer to revisit the same information.

Of course, AIs are smarter and more valuable than simple information-gathering tools. Using sentiment analysis, Einstein can help an agent understand the tone of the conversation they are about to have with a customer and adjust their approach accordingly. Even further than that, Einstein can suggest the best answers to provide to customers based on the context of the conversation and even offer recommendations that are personalized and outline the next best actions to take.

Conclusion

Improving your customer experience can offer substantial gains to your bottom line. To get there, you'll need to understand where you can improve, a solid plan of action, and the tools to support those improvements. Salesforce is the ideal partner for this - it offers gives teams the tools they need to enact new processes, empowers them in decision making, and provides the reporting capabilities to measure the effectiveness of the changes that you implement.

Moving the needle on CX isn't something you need to do alone. Six Consulting has helped organizations in a wide range of industries realize the benefits of marrying CX improvements with the Salesforce platform. Contact Six Consulting to discuss how we can help you customize your SFDC instance to better suit your needs, integrate it with other systems to streamline customer interactions or get you started with a brand new Salesforce instance.