“I would say automation now is a must for all companies.”
That was the opinion of Khun Gigs-Kasin Suthammanas, CEO and Co-Founder of Finnomena Group, in a recent discussion on the State of Service.
And he’s not alone. Businesses around the world are looking for ways to automate, improve productivity, and reduce costs. In the face of increasing costs and evolving customer demands, organisations are turning to trusted tools and platforms to help them with their automation requirements. According to a recent study, Salesforce customers who use Customer 360 are achieving 27% faster automation of business processes, and a 26% increase in employee productivity. At the same time, by consolidating the apps they use, they are reducing IT costs by 25%.*
Khun Gigs was joined for the conversation by Konlawachara Trakulsuk, known as Khun Bank, General Manager for Product Management at Central Group, and Dr Ruthairat Protprakorn, Regional Sales Director at Salesforce.
The group discussed the various ways that Finnomena and Central Group have been able to automate their operations across service and sales.
Automated contact centre tools make things easier for agents
Khun Gigs explained how automated call routing has cut down on admin time for service agents, and also led to more customer satisfaction.
Many calls that Finnomena deals with involve personal customer data, information about savings and revenue. “We have 200,000 customers and 300–400 new customers daily,” said Khun Gigs. “What if you called in and our contact centre recognised you and directed your call to the advisor you talked to previously. How great would that be?”
By routing customers to an agent they have encountered before, Finnomena can reduce admin time and increase customer confidence. In fact, Salesforce customers have reported that automation tools provided by Service Cloud have led to a 27% reduction in service and support costs.*
Salesforce tools for contact centres extend beyond simple call routing. Khun Bank gave an example related to Central Group brand PowerBuy.
“When someone makes a purchase from PowerBuy, there will sometimes be after-sales activity when there are cracks, defects, or repairs. Sometimes customers can’t explain the situation via voice and text services, and it consumes a lot of the agent’s time.”
Central Group would find that service agents were using their own devices to receive photographs or make video calls so they could better understand the issues the customer was facing. Of course, this was not a secure way of communicating, either for the agent or the customer.
But, using Visual Remote Assistant in Service Cloud, Central Group empowered their service agents to communicate using photos and video functions within the app, speeding up the entire process and creating a happier outcome for the customer.
“We have closed the gap. All the data is secure and in the right place for future investigations. We have reduced the handling time and connected better with customers, and we can close the case successfully,” said Khun Bank.
Automated account creation and verification speeds up the customer experience
Another innovation that benefits both customers and service agents is the automation of account creation and verification at Finnomena.
In the past, customers would register and have to wait two days before they received a call from the Finnomena agent.
“Our process took two days to work over data on the cloud, to identify if they were an existing customer, and to find out who they had spoken to in the past. All of that before the sales assignment stage,” says Khun Gigs.
“I knew that wasn’t right – when customers express their interest it means they want the product or service straight away.”
Salesforce helped customise all Finnomena’s customer journeys. After the Salesforce implementation, data within applications became real-time. Today, if you register with Finnomena online, an agent will call you back within 2 hours.
“I’m so happy with this solution. We have seen a better conversion rate. And we can serve customers when they want us,” said Khun Gigs.
Automated cross-sales and lead scoring increases sales productivity
As seen in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect more than 60% of their interactions with businesses to be online. At the same time, nearly half of all customers said they have switched brands in search of better customer service.
To stay ahead of this trend, Central Group has introduced its Chat & Shop service. It’s a multi-channel digital assistant, accessible through social media channels, the Central app, and online stores. When Chat & Shop customers want to go shopping, but don’t have the time — the service offers a personalised service, suggesting products and services the customer may be interested in.
The Chat & Shop team gets 10,000 to 20,000 contacts monthly, either through ads or via direct message. Salesforce technology has helped Central Group agents increase the conversion rate, closing more deals and offering suggestions for upselling and cross-selling.
“Salesforce is very important in helping our customers and streamlining our processes. We can use our sales data across channels, and for customer segmentation. This is our plan to improve customer service,” said Khun Bank.
There’s even more on the horizon. Finnomena is exploring how it can leverage Sales Cloud’s automated lead scoring capabilities to make its sales pipeline even more efficient.
Finnomena is receiving as many as 400 new leads per day, says Khun Gigs.
“We have a data team that analyses the data — that team is working on a lead-scoring model that will allow us to automatically prioritise the best of these 300–400 new leads,” he says. “We’ll use Salesforce to automate the referrals to the right sales advisors, which leaves our team more time to sell.”
Employee happiness = customer happiness
Back to that quote that we started this article with, when Khun Gigs said that “automation now is a must for all companies.”
In our State of Service report we learned that 85% of service decision makers agreed that there was a direct link between employee experience and customer experience. One way of improving the employee experience is to ensure that they have the tools and information they need to serve the customer effectively and quickly.
“It is not right to make your employees suffer with manual work when you have a lot of customers. Many tools are available now,” Khun Gigs continued.
The good news is that high-performing organisations are already providing their teams with the tools and data they need. Eighty-eight percent of agents at high-performing service organisations agree that they have access to complete information about customers’ sales interactions.
