5 Ways Being Active in a Professional Community Helped Me Accelerate My Customer Service Career

If you want to advance in your customer service career path, professional community matters. The people in your community play a crucial role in helping you stay updated with the latest technological advancements and enhancing your skills. By connecting with them, you can build valuable relationships that may lead to new job opportunities and personal growth.

The Salesforce community has been a huge part of my journey, from my early days as I was aspiring to be a Salesforce admin to my current role as a corporate VP. Their support has been invaluable as I transitioned from a customer service team lead to a leadership position.

Building your skills requires hard work and dedication. However, your community can help you not only build your skills but also your network and achieve so much more than you ever would on your own.

When you are intentionally active in the Salesforce Serviceblazer Community, and as you’re building momentum along your customer service career path, the community can deliver many benefits. Here are five I’ve experienced as a result of my Salesforce community personally.

What you’ll learn:

• Who is a Serviceblazer?
• What is the Serviceblazer Community?
• 5 ways a professional community can help boost your career

Who is a Serviceblazer?

But first, let’s get on the same page about what this community is and who it’s made of. The customer-obsessed “Serviceblazer” is Salesforce’s definition for service professionals who are team builders, problem solvers, and customer advocates. Serviceblazers not only deliver exceptional service themselves, they inspire their team to take the customer experience to the next level. I’m just one of many, many Serviceblazers in the world. (Back to top)

What is the Serviceblazer Community?

The Salesforce Serviceblazer Community is an online platform where contact center and field service professionals, industry experts, and Salesforce enthusiasts from around the globe meet to ask questions, share expertise, and grow together. It’s where you can connect with peers and engage in continuous learning about the latest customer service trends.

The community isn’t something to join just so you can check ‘networking’ off your career ‘to do’ list – it offers so much more. (Back to top)

5 ways a professional community can help boost your career

1. Find a mentor

At a certain point about four years into my career as a Salesforce admin, my boss couldn’t help me with my questions anymore. She knew less than I did. So she suggested I go to a Salesforce User Group meeting. It changed my life, because it was there that I met an incredible mentor. 

This was in 2009. At that time, there were very few Black women in tech. Being the ‘only’ in that setting felt lonely. Then a Salesforce MVP — one of the first — who was also a founder of my local Salesforce User Group, “Invited me In.” She became my mentor and took me under her wing. 

That lonely feeling became less so, and I became a regular at our community meetings. This involvement contributed not only to my professional development but also my personal development. I’ve had the privilege of being awarded the distinguished designation of Salesforce MVP and was recently inducted into the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. 

If the Serviceblazer Community had been around when I met my mentor, I could have met her and so many others online. The relationships you start online are just as beneficial as the ones you form in person. They turn into far more than just online contacts – these connections become treasured colleagues, friends, and even mentors. You care about the individual, about their growth and their customer service career path, and you stay connected.

2. Ask questions without fear

Even after you’ve gained certifications and a certain level of expertise, there’s always more to learn about customer service. Service Cloud is constantly adding the latest developments in technology – think about all the new ways to use AI in the contact center now. Changes to customer service software are only going to continue. 

This is an exciting part of customer service – you’re never going to have all the answers. It is okay to ask questions, without fear of looking clueless. One of my favorite quotes from my mother is a closed mouth don’t get fed. I have found this to be an invaluable life lesson that has benefited me more times than I can count.

Personally, I find that I learn best when others are learning with me. Other people ask questions I might not think to ask, and this helps me retain information. 

Before Trailhead or the Serviceblazer Community, I started a local study group to help me achieve my certifications. Now, you can do the same thing by raising your questions – like about generative AI or smart knowledge management – in the Serviceblazer Community. 

3. Become more strategic

The cool thing about being part of a community of people steeped in providing customer service is that you become familiar with problems that you may face in your own organization – even if you haven’t yet faced them. This helps you become more strategic, which in turn helps grow your career. 

I’m no longer providing direct customer service like I used to. Instead, I help customers with strategy. 

This involves understanding each customer’s goals, and then recommending the best route to achieve them. It’s precisely because I get both the details of delivering quality customer service and the big picture possibilities and risks, that I’m able to thrive in a strategic role. 

The more you know, the more you can see, the more useful you become. It’s pretty important to become familiar with other people and their challenges and questions across service organizations. 

And to stay aware of the latest tech capabilities and trends. This really catapults your learning and helps you see the big picture. And you can do it all as part of the Serviceblazer Community. 

4. Discover a new way of learning

It goes without saying that to build your career, you need to develop your skills. You probably already know that you can pursue badges and certifications on Trailhead, and when you get stuck, the Serviceblazer Community is there to help you solve the issue. Fellow Serviceblazers can help you on your customer service career path to certification as a Salesforce admin, a Service Cloud consultant, or Field Service consultant. 

For real-world challenges – the ones that you face at work – the Serviceblazer Community can be just as helpful. Your fellow Serviceblazers may have faced very similar challenges in their workplaces. Or, they may have avoided them by setting up their customer service processes in a completely different way. We all have a lot to learn from one another.

Here’s an example where the Serviceblazer Community could have helped me. I was a customer service manager at a durable medical equipment (DME) company. Over a few months, I noticed an increasing number of customer complaints regarding billing errors. These complaints were leading to customer dissatisfaction, increased call volumes, and higher churn rates. The senior management tasked me with developing a strategic plan to address these issues and improve overall customer satisfaction. 

If the Serviceblazer Community had been around then, I could have learned best practices from my fellow Serviceblazers on how to effectively implement a customer feedback improvement strategy. Their guidance and support would have set me up for success faster. Remember, the Serviceblazer Community is made up of successful customer service professionals and thought leaders who are open to sharing their knowledge. 

5. Avoid groupthink and access thoughtful colleagues

You know how when you’ve been in a job or particular company for a while, you absorb the company culture and majority way of thinking? The Serviceblazer Community helps you break out of that. It’s not just an echo chamber – where one person says something and then everyone else agrees. 

At the same time, the group is made up of like-minded people – peers who, like you, are committed to delivering an exceptional customer experience. So that’s a huge commonality we all benefit from. The Serviceblazer Community is there for you to go for continuous feedback. We’re all learning, but we’re also all teaching at the same time. 

Bottom line: people are a great asset as you move along in your customer service career path. Today is a great day to connect with more of them who are committed to understanding customer service trends and improving service delivery. (Back to top)