It seems like ages ago, but there was a time where not every company had a website. Moreover, during that critical time when people were getting on the web in droves, companies that delayed building an online presence ended up missing out big time. In the more recent past, almost every company needed a mobile presence to transact where people were. For companies without a mobile app, it is even easier these days for their customers to switch to a competitor.
Similarly, consumers have flocked to social channels. Customers are congregating more than ever, having conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Instagram and more. Whether you like it or not, your customers are talking amongst each other, and with future customers in many cases, for all to see. Savvy companies are not putting their blinders on. While they may not be able to control the narrative, companies can engage in conversations that help the consumer and enhance the company brand. Without it, silence equates to indifference.
Digital Engagement to the rescue
If you are not in the room, you are not listening. Salesforce’s Digital Engagement platform enables you to peer in social channels in a readily scalable way and track keywords and overall customer sentiment.
Better yet, using the Salesforce Service Cloud Console, you can monitor conversations across Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp and Instagram (with more being added) and respond to customers quickly and efficiently. Because it is integrated with Sales and Service Cloud, you can quickly take a social network post and turn it into a case or a lead and let your tried and true process take over from there.
Not all conversations should be drawn out in public, so a best practice is to acknowledge the issue, offer to help and take the conversation private through direct messaging. Showing that you are listening and that you care is a great added bonus for all that are watching. Being able to turn that complaint into a five-star review can turn failure into success.
Social channels like Twitter can have conversations that scale very quickly. Think about a great promotion that is catching steam or a network outage that causes customers to tweet up a storm. Digital Engagement provides tools to monitor sentiment and be able to handle case and lead loads quickly. For one client, we built automations to handle system outages. Tweets related to the outage automatically had a case created and tied to the specific outage. The network operations team could tweet out status messages related to the outage and, once resolved, could send out a resolution notice and automatically close out all related cases. These types of scale features provide massive benefits: you can find and respond to issues more quickly, more thoroughly and with fewer errors, while simultaneously getting rich data that shows how many customers you are helping and how quickly and effectively you are handling their issues. Because Salesforce is a platform, these types of industry-leading automations can be created that give you an advantage over your competition.
Regardless if the interaction is on Twitter, email, phone or Facebook, you want your customer data to be consistent and organized. When an account manager looks at a customer record, they want to see the rich case history regardless of where the conversation took place. By leveraging Digital Engagement with Sales and Service Cloud, you get a 360-degree view of the customer.
The great thing about any good platform is that it can scale. Support for new channels are in the works for Salesforce Digital Engagement to be able to handle new social networks—it means you can support more channels in the future with less cost and more return on investment. In addition, it is easier for your team, because each additional channel requires minimal training and handling. Of course, each social network has its nuances—Twitter and Facebook are quite public, and responses have to be handled in a very specific way versus case handling in one-on-one conversations. However, Digital Engagement takes away much of the technology and process costs you have to deal with in expanding your customer service capabilities.
