Exceed customer expectations with Service Cloud and Slack
Lower costs, increase team productivity and go beyond customer expectations with Service Cloud and Slack
The state of service today.
Hyperdriven by the pandemic, customers and businesses have moved firmly into the digital age, with everyone using a variety of tools to get work done. Since 2020, our data finds that transparency and active engagement are essential to meet heightened customer expectations, as proven by a 47% increase in video support. Yet many organizations have technology systems that do not fully support these expectations. According to Intercom, 46% of support leaders say that their tech stack creates a barrier to achieving their goals.
Working in myriad apps reduces team productivity and slows business growth. To better serve customers, service teams need to find new ways to adapt and keep up with innumerable tools, contact methods, siloed teams and sidelined data.
Employees in support operations need to ask themselves:
- How can we accelerate time to resolution?
- How do employees find the data and resources they need, given the knowledge gaps and silos between tiered teams?
- How can we reduce administrative tasks to keep teams productive?
- How can service teams keep up with increasing demands, not just in case quantity and complexity but in customer expectations for personalized, streamlined experiences?
The answer? Using Slack as your productivity platform and Salesforce’s Service Cloud integration to unlock your productivity potential and increase customer loyalty.
Break down silos. Resolve cases and incidents faster
The solution is for teams to have a complete view of the customer journey, from beginning to end.
Sixty-two percent of service pros say all departments use the same CRM software.
Enter Service Cloud and Slack, which can cut support costs and make service teams more productive when used together. Service Cloud lowers support costs by 27%, according to our 2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study, while Slack increases employee productivity by 26%, according to our 2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study.
Let’s look closely at swarming with Service Cloud and Slack. Unlike tiered support that escalates cases up the ladder and bounces customers between departments, swarming provides a single place for service agents, engineers and whoever is analyzing the root cause of the issue to come together in real time. The swarm team can share information with customers before they even know they need it.
In addition, our Field Service mobile app helps connect users with experts instantly. If an onsite technician needs additional support to troubleshoot and help resolve an issue, they can easily open a swarm channel directly from the app, reducing the need for unnecessary truck rolls. The app allows technicians to go to the Service Appointment record and view any existing swarms related to the record in question. Clicking on it takes them to the swarm channel in Slack, so they can easily begin chatting with other members in the swarm, right from their phone.
Working in unison, Service Cloud and Slack use out-of-the-box workflows to automatically bring together the right cross-functional experts and create a Slack channel for teams to collaborate on complex and high-priority cases. This eliminates messy handoffs and siloed decision-making that stops work dead in its tracks. Swarming means everyone can see the whole conversation, hop on a call via Slack huddles or even search to see how similar cases were resolved.
You can initiate a swarm request from Slack in two different ways:
- If there’s an existing channel with the product experts you need help from, you can select this channel when creating the swarm.
- If there isn’t an existing channel with the people you need help from, you can create a new channel for your swarm. You can manually select people, or you can use the expert finder function to search for people based on skills, capacity and availability.
To get started with swarming, make sure that you’re using the Service Cloud for Slack app. This app brings the customer record right into Slack, so teams can swarm on customer issues in Slack alongside Service Cloud data. It’s easy to view, edit and search for Service Cloud records, such as account, contact, case and incident, directly from the Service Cloud for Slack app.
Swarming saves the day.
Let’s say a retailer notices it’s having systemwide payment incidents. The company is at risk of losing untold sales—not just from unplaced orders, but from the disruption and distrust this might cause with any potential buyer. A swarm comes together to address the incident.
Who might be included in that swarm? The service rep who identified the incident and anyone tagged in the case such as marketing team members who can triage the situation with email offers; engineers who can fix the problem or find a workaround; key members of the accounting team; and even contacts from outside payment agencies, all thanks to Slack Connect.
And remember, while multiple experts are busy swarming in real time to solve the issue behind the scenes, the customer is shielded from this activity and maintains just one point of contact: the service representative.
As a result, an incident that could have been a disaster gets triaged in real time, with all the critical parties, data, docs and apps needed in one secure place—and customers still get a great experience, even when incidents pop up.
Automate and streamline collaboration
The biggest barrier to great service experiences is time; time to resolution and time on hold. And there are never quite enough hours in a workday. Customers feel it—and so do employees. The majority of service agents (78%) still struggle to balance speed and quality, according to our latest State of Service report. One key reason: Most agents work across multiple systems to access experts and knowledge.
In fact, according to Intercom, 77% of support teams use between one and 10 different tools to do daily tasks, and 44% of teams use between six and 10 tools. If your systems aren’t integrated, your support team could be throwing hours away every day just searching through systems instead of spending time with customers or moving on to the next case.
Service Cloud and Slack return those precious hours by extending workflows across your business. Soon Slack GPT will amplify the power of CRM and conversational data to help everyone in the organization be more productive. You’ll be able to make better decisions with AI-generated summaries that deliver insights from conversations, and create no-code workflows. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to leverage Einstein GPT to summarize critical swarm learnings directly from Slack and turn it into a searchable article in the Service Cloud console that can help others.
Slack’s Workflow Builder and Salesforce’s Flow Builder are no-code tools that work together to automate complicated daily tasks with just a few clicks. They simply guide users through complicated processes and manage tasks on the back end. In essence, they fuel the transparency, agility and cross-team collaboration that helps reps focus on customers, not data entry.
Workflow Builder helps you automate routine processes into workflows in your Slack workspace, with no coding required. Workflows can be as simple or as complex as you’d like, and connect to the other apps and services you use. Create whatever task you need from scratch or use a prebuilt workflow template to get started immediately. Because workflows are generated right in Slack channels, you get full transparency between teams and teammates, and everyone in your organization can access them.
If you need to route approvals, request a billing exemption, submit requests to HR and IT, or even collect customer case information via Slack Connect, create a simple workflow in Slack.
According to our 2022 Salesforce Success Metrics Global Highlights study, service organizations using Slack saw:
- 32% increase in Net Promoter Score
- 27% decrease in service/support costs
- 30% increase in agent productivity
- 30% increase in customer retention
The real magic happens when you use Flow Builder and Slack shortcuts together. Flow Builder allows you to create guided workflows and perform actions between Salesforce and Slack.
Turn to the slash command.
Turn your service team into a loyalty-building machine
Ever-changing customer expectations and desires are evident in every industry. When 88% of customers believe that their experience with a company is as important as its products, the role of service professionals as front-line ambassadors becomes crystal clear. Good customer service is a critical differentiator. Fortunately, swarming presents an opportunity to exceed expectations by bringing customers into the swarm channel with you. Now you can wow them like never before.
Slack Connect gives partners, vendors and B2B customers direct access to support through a dedicated Slack Connect channel. Customers can get transparent and personalized white-glove support while working collaboratively to resolve their issues securely and efficiently.
Slack Connect also serves as an ideal channel for two-way communication, where an organization can make service updates, for example, and the customer can provide product feedback and make requests.
Simplify the conversation.
Slack clips and white-glove service
Slack also helps support teams deliver white-glove service by providing key customers with a private support channel. If customers hit a technical roadblock, they can use their smartphone to record the error and upload that into their channel. Then the support team can upload the video into the service ticket with any photos and descriptions they’ve sent along.
Dell reduces service delays.
“With clips, we can see exactly what the customer is looking at via video, which helps us provide support and resolve any issues much faster.”
David Felt
Technical Marketing Engineer, Dell Technologies
Opportunity knocks
The business landscape is now more remote and decentralized with significant challenges to team productivity and collaboration. The customer experience has become the key brand differentiator and customer expectations have never been higher.
That doesn’t have to feel daunting. It’s an opportunity to exceed customer expectations by transforming service cases into lasting relationships. With Service Cloud and Slack, you can find solutions that help you cut costs and boost team productivity with the workforce you’ve already built.
Learn About Service Cloud for Slack
Solve Service Issues Faster with Slack
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Maximize Productivity with Service Cloud and Slack
More resources
Service Swarming With Slack: How Salesforce Support Delivers Better, Faster Case Resolution
Bring Customers Closer with Slack Connect
