In today’s social world, there are so many different ways that customers can engage with brands. They can have one-to-one conversations with you over web chat, mobile messaging (SMS) and even publicly on Twitter and Facebook.
If you try to set these up on your own, you, unfortunately, may have a few hurdles you should consider:
- Each channel will have its own credential, but unless it is tied in with your overall ticketing system, you may need to staff the channel with a subset of people with the credential. This has serious limitations when it comes to responding in the channel—particularly as many of these channels are hyper-time-sensitive and can scale up quickly.
- Each channel’s data may be siloed from the rest of the customer service information. For instance, are the Twitter responses fed back into your customer service software so that you can get an accurate measurement of how many tickets you truly addressed?
- Each channel may have its own process, but for common parts, does the wheel have to be re-invented for each process? Is routing done independently? How are responses handled? Do they have to be centrally and manually routed to the right expert, and then once the response is formulated, get it approved and manually communicated back to the requestor?
Enter Digital Engagement for Salesforce. It is a separately licensed service that connects multiple digital channels into one, easy-to-manage platform. Channels include mobile messaging, web chat, social networks and more. Would it not be great to be able to connect the Digital Engagement platform to your accounts for Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp and other channels so that incoming messages are automatically created as tickets, which in turn can be automatically Omnichannel routed to the right agent? No more worrying about separate staffing of your Twitter feed. In addition, tickets can follow the same workflow you already set up for your email, web and telephone processes. This means case management, escalations and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management can all be consistent across all your channels.
Staffing is also a dream, because your agents can pick off requests from the queue (or be routed to directly) regardless of what channel it came from. Agents can work seamlessly with resolving issues without having to juggle Twitter, Facebook and other channel credentials, or worry about special handling of SMS and Webchat channels.
In this series, we will discuss at a high level how these channels operate and how you can have one platform to manage all of these in one easy way.
Specifically, we’ll cover:
Two-way channels—Live message chat and two-way SMS are a necessity now in this instant messaging world. Rather than wait on hold, or discuss through a single-threaded conversation, customers love to multitask and communicate with a live person using messaging to get help while working on other things.
Social channels—Public channels up the game when it comes to scaling and with visibility to all, require special attention. Twitter storms can create situations where many issues need to be addressed quickly and publicly.
Chatbots—One of the most popular forms of self-service, chatbots, are increasingly a great way for customers to get what they are looking for quickly and efficiently and without a human “getting in the way.” Chatbots also create incredible data that can help provide better service overall.
Digital Engagement helps to make sure you are in the conversations your customers are already having in the channels your customers are already using. In addition, the value of having all service data consolidated into one platform provides immense value not only for reporting but also for customer service. An account manager does not want to miss their customer’s important conversation occurring over Twitter just because the company’s Twitter messages are not connected to Salesforce and the account record. One platform to rule them all.
