We already know that with Salesforce, you can plan, manage, measure, and improve lead generation, qualification, and conversion. You can see how much business you or your team generates, the sources of that business, and who in your team is making it happen. What about the step preceding that, though? There’s no use in filling your pipeline with leads that won’t actually follow through. So, how do you make sure your leads are qualified?
Pardot, Salesforce’s marketing automation tool, ensures that you fill your pipeline with the highest-quality leads. You can use the tool to create custom landing pages, lead capture forms, and targeted personalized emails. This helps your business shorten the sales cycle and close deals faster. You can set up personalized lead scoring based on criteria that you decide, to evaluate how qualified prospective buyers are. You can control which marketing content and messaging goes out to those leads based on that score criteria. Finally, you can add those leads that aren’t quite ready to buy to your nurture campaigns, so that you can spend more time “nurturing” them into high-scoring leads that will more likely purchase your product. This, in turn, accelerates your pipeline and ensures that team effort is being spent where it will pay off most, all from a central place.
When the sale is closed, good companies don’t say sayonara. An organization should still keep tabs on customers, or have relevant purchase history ready on the off chance that the customer will reach out with questions or issues. This is the foundation of customer support. Salesforce Service Cloud is a tool that helps call centers and customer service agents track customer interactions after point of sale.
This section provides an overview of what you can do with Service Cloud. For a lot more information, see Salesforce Service Cloud For Dummies, by Jon Paz and TJ Kelley (Wiley).
Managing customer interactions with cases
Remember when you used to call a toll-free number about a broken product that you bought? Maybe you emailed a support email address or filled out a web form. Whichever method you chose, chances are, you weren’t at your happiest at that moment. And who can blame you? It’s critical that customers receive world-class customer service from companies. Today, customers demand satisfaction more than ever before. If they aren’t satisfied, they can easily turn to competitors, or even worse, create smear campaigns against a company with bad customer service on social media networks.
Have you ever heard a customer service representative say, “One second while I pull up your record”? Those records are what we call cases in Service Cloud. Cases are related to contact records, so when a customer calls in, an agent can quickly pull up her record and see not only her purchase history, but also a record of every issue and interaction that customer has had with your organization. Cases, and the ability to clearly see what’s going on with customers, make both your customer service reps, as well as your customers themselves, much happier. Nobody wants to be transferred to another agent, only to have to repeat the issue for the third time.
Service Cloud uses case management to expedite and streamline customer service, creating a much more efficient experience for everyone involved and bringing your service organization into the 21st century.
Interacting with the customer across multiple channels
Service Cloud has an added benefit: the ability to interact with customers across multiple channels. Or perhaps it’s better said differently: Service Cloud gives your customers the choice of how they want to connect with your company.
Not only can customers choose to contact you anytime, anywhere, and from any device, but they can also choose the medium through which they do so. Some customers are old-fashioned and prefer calling a toll-free number. Other customers dread long hold times and would rather chat with an agent online. Giving your customers the choice to contact you the way they see fit will do wonders for their perception of your company. Service Cloud gives you many different ways to do this, and it will pay off in terms of satisfaction, as well as reduced operational cost.
If you already use Salesforce, this topic may be a moot point. At the very least, you know which version of Salesforce you have.
All versions have the same consistent look and feel, but each varies by feature, functionality, and pricing. If you’re considering using Salesforce, consult with an account executive for more details about edition differences, pricing, and upgrade paths. Here are four versions of Salesforce.com’s service:
❯❯ IQ Starter: This edition has replaced the Group and Contact Manager editions. It’s a basic, out-of-the-box CRM system that offers basic account and contact management for up to five users.
❯❯ Professional: A thorough CRM system for any size organization that’s starting to nail down processes. Again, you can track the full sales life cycle from a new lead to a closed opportunity. Dashboards allow managers to track key metrics at a glance. Some optional features for businesses with more detailed process needs (such as managing marketing campaigns, creating contracts, tracking various products sold, or accessing Salesforce while offline) come at an extra cost.
❯❯ Enterprise: More sales and service functionality for more complex organizations, including the ability to integrate with other systems within your company, and the ability to create custom solutions with code. This edition provides more value than if you were to pay extra for certain add-on features in more basic editions. If you absolutely need your business processes to look and act a specific way, this edition provides more ways to make that happen for you.
❯❯ Unlimited: Even more customization capabilities for extending Salesforce to other business uses. You need a dedicated (and usually technical) administrator to take advantage of all the options that this edition delivers.
❯❯ Performance: This edition offers bundled pricing for Sales and Service Cloud licensing. It has everything the Unlimited Edition provides, but also includes features such as Live Agent Chat, an integrated knowledge base, as well as additional sandboxes.
Whichever edition you choose, the good news is that every edition of Salesforce is rich with features that can help companies of every size address their business challenges. You can choose a more basic edition today and upgrade later, as needed. Upgrades happen in the background and are easy, so you can focus on the business processes that drive the need for new functionality. And when Salesforce.com rolls out new releases of its service, it provides product enhancements for the different editions wherever relevant.
Most companies tend to make a decision between using Professional or Enterprise Edition. Budget may be an issue, but the decision usually boils down to core business needs. Consider these questions:
• Does your company have different groups with distinct sales processes, customers, and products?
• Does your company have a lead-generation or service team that relies on a call script when initially speaking with prospects or customers?
• Does your company plan to integrate Salesforce with other applications?
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