(upbeat music)
How's it going, everyone?
Today, we're talking all about proactive service.
We'll define what it is and why it's important,
and three ways that Salesforce combines data
and our own technology to build better customer experiences.
Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce.
An inside look at our sales, service,
marketing and IT business
with helpful how-to tips that you can use
For service professionals, we have tips
like how to create self-service experiences
or how to increase agent productivity and so much more.
So you're probably wondering what exactly is
Well, assisted service is when a customer engages
with a live agent via email phone, social or chat.
Self-service is then when a customer resolves
an issue themselves by searching for knowledge articles
or watching helpful videos or asking users in a community.
So then proactive service is when you identify
a customer's need and you provide a solution
before they identify the issue themselves.
Like, when you receive a text reminder
that you're almost out of data, or a delivery notification
that you have a package arriving late.
Or reminder from your doctor,
that you're due for a wellness check.
All of these are examples of proactive service
that drive customer loyalty.
And customers today don't just want a product.
They want a seamless experience or outcome.
And at Salesforce, we offer
our proactive service capabilities
to our signature success plan customers.
In building our proactive service experience,
we've learned a couple of best practices.
So here are three things to consider
as you're building a proactive service experience.
So tip number one, monitor your customer's data for trends.
There's a lot of data out there, a lot.
And it's critical that you connect all of those data sources
into a single pane of glass.
Then you need to make it accessible to everyone
and you need to empower your team
to make more meaningful interactions
and better business decisions.
At Salesforce, we use tableau dashboards
to visualize and identify trends based
on our customers' data and their usage.
We can identify thresholds, we can review trends over time,
and then we can build proactive triggers
that notify us when a customer is at risk
of experiencing an issue.
So when our retailer is preparing for the holidays,
or an insurance company is preparing for open enrollment,
we know that that seamless experience is critical
to the success of their business.
So we will closely monitor their service cloud,
marketing cloud, or commerce cloud instances.
Okay, but you're probably asking,
what data points should I monitor
and how do I determine those thresholds?
Well, at Salesforce, we went to our highest performing
frontline support team members to ask what data points
Then we built metrics around that.
So if you don't know where to start
make sure that you bring in experts who live and breathe
this data day in and day out.
create processes to communicate risks as soon as possible.
Not only do customers want to know of an issue before
impacts them, but they expect companies
to notify them immediately.
Imagine arriving at your boarding gate at the airport
only to learn that the gates been moved.
To prepare for these customer notifications,
we recommend that you build an effective contact list
of your customer's organization.
Are there geo-specific points of contact?
Are there multiple points of contact?
Is there somebody only for the weekdays?
Having a robust tool like marketing cloud
that can identify who the right customer point of contact is
and automatically notify them early is a game changer.
And at Salesforce, we send a customer an alert
with the details on what to do next
This can include information about critical signals,
potential impact and recommendations
so that customers can act quickly
or address the issue should it arise.
Sometimes we'll take it one step further
and we'll proactively create a case in service cloud
on behalf of our signature customers,
so that we can get our support teams working on it
And don't just communicate to the customer,
make sure that you share this
with your customers account team
and all the other relevant stakeholders.
Now, in my role as a leader of technical account managers,
my team uses Slack as our digital HQ
to communicate and collaborate
with both internal stakeholders and customers.
And when a proactive monitoring alert blows off,
Slack can notify support engineers and the customer.
These direct channels with customers are particularly
important during critical incidents and key events.
follow up with personalized solution
and preventative measures.
This last step is incredibly important
So after you've identified the issue
and you've communicated it to your customers,
it's important that you help customers understand
the root cause of the issue and provide preventative tips
At Salesforce, our technical account managers can do this
First, they'll look deeper into a customer's org
to understand why the issue occurred.
Is it because something was configured wrong?
Is there code that needs to be refactored?
Or a business process that needs to be optimized?
Customers can take that information
and then work with their teams to implement
Now, additionally, we'll share the root cause analysis
with our product and our engineering teams
so that any issues or bugs in the product are updated,
thereby preventing future issues for other customers.
So proactive service is not just about identifying an issue
It's about helping customers to implement change
to prevent it from happening again.
That's three steps that you can take
to provide proactive services to your customers.
We hope you've enjoyed this episode
of Salesforce on Salesforce.
Please be sure to check out the resources provided
and watch the other episodes in this series.
And we'll see you next time.
