Chapter 14
Diversifying Your Support Channels
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding the multi-channel approach
Planning your Service Cloud experience
Using multi-channel for self-service
Case management is the heart of any support strategy, and Salesforce Service Cloud highlights this by giving you the tools to provide excellent customer service through a wide range of channels. In an increasingly connected social world, conventional (and more operationally expensive) service channels such as call centers can no longer be the only source of service.
Today’s consumer seeks immediate service around the clock through a variety of devices and channels, without listening to hold music or repeating the issue to multiple reps. The modern customer leaves public feedback, making the customer’s experience critical to your company’s image and success.
No matter which channel(s) your business employs, Service Cloud gives you the tools to successfully support your multi-channel strategy to deliver consistently high-quality customer support anytime and anywhere.
In this chapter, we lay out how to prepare for your multi-channel strategy. We talk about some of the more popular support channels and show you how you can better direct your customers to self-service options. Then we take a quick look at how Communities play into your multi-channel approach to servicing your customer base.
Preparing Your Salesforce Service Cloud Strategy
As is the case with any new endeavor, you need to put some time and thought into a viable strategy to set you up for success. In order to prepare for some of the great Service Cloud features available to you, think about what you want to get out of this project. Are you having problems keeping your customers happy? Are you looking to reduce cost? Increase profit margins? Maybe you just want to reduce call agent attrition and make their lives easier? Identifying these reasons upfront will help you plan where you’re going with your implementation.
Planning the implementation
As a support executive, if you want to get Service Cloud working for you, you need to do some careful upfront planning. After you think through your processes, you can customize cases either by yourself or with your Service Cloud administrator.
Here are some tips to think about before you get started:
- Define and prioritize your service and support objectives.
- Identify and acknowledge your key challenges. Try to identify the biggest ones first.
- Start with the end in mind. The best way to customize your application is to decide what you want to measure first.
- Map out your key processes. If you’re a Visio whiz, use that tool. If not, grab a marker and diagram your key processes on a whiteboard or flip chart. For different types of support issues, think about the similar and different types of information that you want your reps to capture.
- Figure out the best approach for your business. You have many different ways to tackle a business issue with Service Cloud — some of these approaches work better than others.
- Assess how much of your support efforts you and your team can share with your customers. If your users would welcome this sort of change, you may want to set up the community.
- Keep it simple. Don’t sacrifice your objectives just to keep things simple. The more complexity you build, the greater the risk that people won’t use the application.
For cases, as with other objects, Service Cloud provides some common design elements that let you customize the record. As you consider customizing cases, keep in mind that you should strive for ease of use, relevance, and data that can help you manage your support executive job while allowing your agents to efficiently manage theirs. (See Chapter 17 for the how-to details on adding new fields, customizing page layouts, adding record types, and other design tricks.)
Identifying your support channels
When you’ve decided that you want to provide multiple channels for your customers to get the support they need, you need to do some upfront work to determine which channels you’ll support, as well as how it all comes together. By offering various avenues through which your customers can get to your agents, you’ll quickly learn that in doing so you are not only increasing customer (and call center employee) satisfaction, but also reducing expenses as call volumes decrease.
Which support channels do you currently have? Make a list of what you have and compare it to your desired future state. When you’re ready, read on.
Delighting Customers with Multi-Channel Support
Multi-channel support is an obvious boon to any organization with loyal customers. Offering your customers various means to reach the same end, issue resolution, has two key benefits:
- Increased customer satisfaction: Customers can interact with your business the way they want to.
- Decreased operational cost: Providing answers via multiple avenues keeps call volume down and your agents focused on more complex cases.
Where in the past each channel lived in its own silo (marketing owned social data, call center managers oversaw daily call volumes, and IT departments managed web traffic), Service Cloud offers a holistic view of customer activity and real-time analytics into the utilization of each channel. Now executives and key decision-makers have visibility into channel popularity and can nimbly pivot toward more frequently used channels and divest from those left in the dust. Agents see customers’ preferred method of contact and engage with them the way they like.
Let’s take a look at some of the features Service Cloud has to help you connect with your customers via multiple channels.
Web-to-Case
In addition to using the phone, your customers may want to reach you directly from your website. With the Web-to-Case feature in Salesforce, your customers fill out a brief form on your company website that automatically creates a case in Salesforce for agents to start working. You can quickly generate a standard HTML form to put on any page; when the customer clicks Submit, the form is sent to Salesforce’s servers, which converts the information to a case. This is one of the fastest ways a customer can submit an inquiry, and one of the easiest ways to increase agent productivity and response time.
Web-to-Case is a certain choice for customer service because customers immediately navigate to a company’s website when they have problems or need help. To be sure, Web-to-Case does have a few limitations and you do need to do some upfront prep work before diving in and implementing it. We go over those details in a bit. But Web-to-Case is one of the most common tools businesses use to automate case creation directly from their site, and after setting it up, you’ll see how easy it is to do in Service Cloud.
Preparing for Web-to-Case
Ensure the following before enabling Web-to-Case to make the setup as smooth as possible:
- Create an email template for the customer. Make sure you have an available default email template that your customers receive when they submit a case. Include a case number or confirmation number that the customer can reference. (See Chapter 4 for more information about email templates.)
- Create active case assignment rules. Build assignment rules to assign a case to a default user or queue. If you don’t have active assignment rules or if the case doesn’t meet their criteria, the owner of a web-generated case will default to the owner indicated in your organization’s support settings. (See Chapter 5 for more on setting up assignment rules.)
- Customize support settings. Use support settings to select a default case owner that serves as a net for those cases that do not meet your assignment rule criteria. To do this, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Cases ⇒ Support Settings, click Edit, and in the Default Case Owner field select the desired user or queue.
Now you’re ready to set up Web-to-Case for your organization.
Enabling Web-to-Case
To set up Web-to-Case, you must first enable it for your organization. Choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Self-Service ⇒ Web-to-Case, and follow these steps:
- On the Capturing Cases from Your Website page, review the listed steps and then click the Generate the HTML link.
- Move the fields you want to display on the Web-to-Case form from the Available Fields column to the Selected column by clicking the Add arrow.
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Enter the URL to which the user returns after submitting the form, and click Generate.
Most web forms direct users to a thank you/submitted page or a support home page.
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Copy and paste the provided HTML code on your website or into a page hosted on your web server, and click Finished.
If this step seems too technical for you, copy and paste the code into an email and send it to someone on your web services or IT team.
When the web form is up and running, test the form by filling it out, and clicking Submit, and ensuring it routes to the appropriate party in Salesforce and captures the information entered.
Your organization is now able to auto-generate cases via a simple HTML web form that integrates directly into Service Cloud.
Email-to-Case
Service Cloud allows agents to quickly and efficiently manage cases through email as well. By sending an inquiry to an email address set up for your support team, Salesforce automatically creates a case in Salesforce and auto-populates relevant case fields, including any attachments the customer sends. If the sender’s email address matches a Contact’s email address in Salesforce, Email-to-Case will associate the new case to that Contact record, as well as the Contact’s Account record. What’s more, agents can reply to the email directly from the case, capturing the entire email thread and customer interaction in one place.
Computer telephony integration (CTI)
The more traditional support channel, the telephone, is not going away anytime soon. Service Cloud supports phone inquiry efficiency in call centers, which is just as important as more modern channels. CTI — technology that facilitates the interaction between or integration of telephone and computer — is commonly used in call centers. It comes in many shapes and sizes but generally reaches the same objective: enabling agents to respond to customers as quickly and effectively as possible with very little needed from the customer.
Live Agent Chat
Another way Salesforce allows your customers to reach you without picking up the phone is through chat. Live Agent Chat is a native chat application that is the quickest way to get in front of your customer and at the lowest cost to you. How customized you want your Live Agent Chat to be is up to you. It can range in complexity depending on that decision.
In order to implement the feature, you have to enable Live Agent, create Live Agent users by giving them access to it, and customize it according to your preferences and settings.
Enabling Live Agent
To enable Live Agent for your organization, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Live Agent ⇒ Settings. Then select Enable Live Agent and click Save.
If the Live Agent menu does not appear under Setup, contact Salesforce.com Support to enable this feature in your organization.
After enabling Live Agent for your organization, you must either create or modify pre-existing user records to provide the relevant Live Agent permissions necessary for them to do their jobs. There are different aspects of Live Agent permissions that are enabled in different places.
Adding Live Agent users
In order to have individual users work as Live Agents and support your customers through chat, they need some minor adjustments to their user records. Choose Setup ⇒ Manage Users ⇒ Users, and then follow these steps:
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Click Edit to the left of the user who will be a Live Agent.
Alternatively, click the New User button and create a new user.
- On the user record, check the Live Agent User check box.
- Click Save.
If you can’t find the Live Agent User check box, your organization needs to buy more Live Agent feature licenses.
Granting Live Agent users the right permissions
You’ve checked the Live Agent User check box on the agent’s user record, but that’s only half the battle. You also have to ensure that your agents have the permissions necessary to accomplish the tasks your company has set out for them. You can accomplish this in one of two ways:
- Profiles: Create or enhance a specific profile to contain these specific permissions bundled within it and assign your Live Agent users to it.
- Permission sets: Create a Live Agent permission set that contains only Live Agent permissions and assign them to the relevant users.
How do you know which option to take? Look at the number of users. Do you have 20 Live Agent users or 3? If your number of Live Agent users is small, add a permission set. Otherwise, create a new profile for your Live Agent users. Just be wary of creating too many profiles — administrating an environment with a large number of profiles can quickly become difficult.
ADMINISTRATIVE PERMISSIONS
All Live Agent users need to have the API Enabled permission.
STANDARD OBJECT PERMISSIONS
The object-level permissions necessary for your Live Agents depend in part on the features you’re implementing. For example, if agents need to see visitor and transcript records, they’ll need (at the very least) Read permissions on the Live Chat Visitors and Live Chat Transcripts objects. In order for them to create Quick Text, users need full access (Create, Read, Edit, Delete) permissions on the Quick Text object, while seeing Live Agent Sessions requires at least Read permissions on that object.
Managers or supervisors may need a higher level of permissions, such as Edit, in order to modify records that agents are working on.
Adding Live Agent skills
After setting up your Live Agent users, add Live Agent skills if your company segments agents into different skill groupings. For example, your customers are normally routed to a first-tier customer service representative for common issues (for example, resetting passwords, making address changes, paying by phone, and so on), but more complex problems are directed to second-tier engineers (for technical assistance and troubleshooting). In this case, you would create two skill sets to segment those agents into the appropriate skill groups.
In Salesforce, you can identify and segment your agents’ skills and then assign those users to the appropriate skill set so that Salesforce routes your customer requests accordingly.
To create a skill in Salesforce, choose Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Live Agent ⇒ Skills, and then follow these steps:
- Click the New button.
- Name the new skill.
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Assign users and profiles to the skill.
You can assign both individual users that have the skill, as well as entire profiles.
- Click Save.
The skill you’ve just created appears on the screen, with its name and its assigned users and profiles.
Assigning Live Agent configurations
Live Agent configurations are packaged pieces of functionality to manage Live Agent in the Salesforce console. They’re also used to control the Live Agent Console, but this feature is no longer available for new Live Agent customers.
Like Live Agent skills, Live Agent configurations are assigned at the user or profile level and are responsible for toggling certain settings in the console, such as
- The number of simultaneous chat sessions an agent can have
- Notifications and sounds when the agent has a new chat request
- Whether an agent can transfer the chat to another agent or even receive files through the chat window
You can assign different Live Agent configurations to different users and profiles, based on the agent’s level of experience or expertise. Consider a new agent that is still training: That agent should probably be grouped in a configuration that allows no more than three chats at any given time. Similarly, you can assign a seasoned agent on your team a configuration that allows for up to seven chats at once. You may want to disable chat transfer for some users while giving this configuration to others.
Creating Live Agent deployments and chat buttons
If you’re planning to implement Live Agent Chat, your website visitors need a clearly visible button on your site that indicates help is available if they need it. Chat buttons for Live Agent are what customers should click when they want to initiate a chat with one of your agents.
Talk to your IT or web team before implementing chat buttons. To customize them, you need to have a Force.com site set up or use some custom code.
You can put multiple chat buttons on your page or deployment, with each button mapped to a specific skill that you’ve already created. In this way, clicking an Internet Issues button will not route you to the same agent as clicking a Telephone Connectivity button.
Assuming you’ve already set up a skill or two, start building your button by choosing Setup ⇒ Customize ⇒ Live Agent ⇒ Chat Buttons & Invitations, and then follow these steps.
- Click the New button.
- From the Type picklist, select Chat Button.
- In the Name field, enter a name for your new chat button.
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The Developer Name field should auto-populate with the same name you provided in the Name field.
The field will have underscores instead of spaces because it’s an API name.
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Choose a routing type from the picklist.
This setting determines how customers are routed to various skills:
- Choice: An inbound chat enters a queue, and any agent assigned the appropriate skill can pick it up.
- Least Active: Automatically routes the inbound chat to the least active agent (measured by number of open chats) that is assigned the appropriate skill.
- Most Available: Routes the inbound chat to the most available agent (measured by chat capacity minus number of open chats).
- Associate specific skills with the button by selecting one or more skills in the Available Skills column and clicking the Add arrow to move them into the Selected Skills column.
- Select the language for the text in your chat window.
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In the Push Timeout field, enter the time agents have to answer inbound chats before the chats are rerouted.
This only applies to you if you selected Least Active or Most Available from the Routing Type picklist in Step 5.
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Fill in the remaining fields in the Basic Information section.
If you have a Force.com site to use for button customizations, enter the information in the Chat Button Customization section.
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Click Save.
The button detail page is displayed with generated chat button code you can copy and paste into your site’s HTML.
Deployments are places on your site where you deploy Live Agent Chat. You create deployments in much the same way as buttons. Like button creation, deployments also require copying and pasting provided code on each web page where you’ll be deploying Live Agent.
There are more customization options for Live Agent that are not outlined here, but now you have the basics down and you’re ready to start chatting with your customers!