It’s critical to focus on helping customers extract value from your products and services now. That’s why your technology team needs to do all it can to leverage existing systems and products to improve the customer experience and retain customers. If you’re already a Salesforce customer, here’s how your tech team can accomplish this now.
1. Stand up a COVID-19 help centre 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 centre or FAQ page.
Get started: Salesforce can help you stand up a central resource centre fast. We provide businesses with free access to Community Cloud so they can quickly build a self-service help centre portal for COVID-19 response. You can sign up to get more info, and don’t forget to review the Quick Start Guide.
2. Increase self-service capacity
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 personalised experience wherever they go.
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 mobile-optimised 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 optimise your mobile experience through either responsive web pages or native mobile apps.
Get started: 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 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 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.
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.
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.
For more advice and expert how-tos for leading your businesses or team through COVID-19, check out the ‘Leading through Change’ series.
Leading Through Change
Helping business manage in crisis.
