Greg breaks down proactive service: monitoring customer data with dashboards to spot problems early, alerting the right people through Marketing Cloud or Slack, and following up with root-cause analysis to prevent future issues. It's about catching problems before customers do.
How's it going everyone? I'm Greg. Today we're talking all about proactive service. We'll define what it is and why it's important and three ways that Salesforce combines data and our own technology to build better customer experiences. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at our sales, service, marketing and IT business with helpful how to tips that you can use for your own business. For service professionals we have tips like how to create self service experiences or how to increase agent productivity and so much more. As always, you can learn more on Trailhead, Salesforce's online learning platform which is linked in the description below. And don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so that you never miss an episode. So you're probably wondering, what exactly is proactive service? Well, assisted service is when a customer engages with a live agent via email, phone, social or chat. Self service is then when a customer resolves an issue themselves by searching for knowledge articles or watching helpful videos or asking users in a community. So then proactive service is when you identify a customer's need and you provide a solution before they identify the issue themselves. Like when you receive a text reminder that you're almost out of data or a delivery notification that you have a package arriving late or reminder from your doctor that you're due for a wellness check. All of these are examples of proactive service that drive customer loyalty. And customers today don't just want a product, they want a seamless experience or outcome. And at Salesforce, we offer our proactive service capabilities to our signature success plan customers. In building our proactive service experience, we've learned a couple of best practices. So here are three things to consider as you're building a proactive service experience. So tip number one Monitor your customers data for trends. There's a lot of data out there, a lot. And it and it's critical that you connect all of those data sources into a single pane of glass. Then you need to make it accessible to everyone in your organization. And you need to empower your team to make more meaningful interactions and better business decisions. At Salesforce, we use tableau dashboards to visualize and identify trends based on our customers data and their usage. We can identify thresholds, we can review trends over time, and then we can build proactive triggers that notify us when a customer is at risk of experiencing an issue. So when our retailer is preparing for the holidays or an insurance company is preparing for open enrollment, we know that that seamless experience is critical to the success of their business, so we will closely monitor their service cloud, marketing cloud or commerce cloud instances. Okay, but you're probably asking what data points should I monitor and how do I determine those thresholds? Well, at Salesforce we went to our highest performing frontline support team members to ask what data points mattered. The then we built metrics around that. So if you don't know where to start, make sure that you bring in experts who live and breathe this data day in and day out. So tip number two Create processes to communicate risks as soon as possible not only do customers want to know of an issue before it impacts them, but they expect companies to notify them immediately. Imagine arriving at your boarding gate at the airport only to learn that the gate's been moved. To prepare for these customer notifications, we recommend that you build an effective contact list of your customer's organization. Are there geo specific points of contact? Are there multiple points of contact? Is there somebody only for the weekdays? Having a robust tool like marketing Cloud that can identify who the right customer point of contact is and automatically notify them early is a game changer. And at Salesforce we send the customer an alert with the details on what to do next when we identify a risk. This can include information about critical signals, potential impact and recommendations so that customers can act quickly or address the issue should it arise. Sometimes we'll take it one step further and we'll proactively create a case in service cloud on behalf of our signature customers so that we can get our support teams working on it right away. And don't just communicate to the customer. Make sure that you share this with your customer's account team, all the other relevant stakeholders. Now in my role as a leader of Technical account managers or TAMs, my team uses Slack as our digital HQ to communicate and collaborate with both internal stakeholders and customers. And when a proactive monitoring alert glows off, Slack can notify support engineers and the customer. These direct channels with customers are particularly important during critical incidents and and key events. Tip 3 Follow up with personalized solution and Preventative measures this last step is incredibly important to build customer trust. So after you have identified the issue and you've communicated it to your customers, it's important that you help customers understand the root cause of the issue and provide preventative tips for the future. At Salesforce, our technical account managers can do this in a number of ways. First, they'll look deeper into a customer's org to understand why the issue occurred. Is it because something was configured wrong? Is there code that needs to be refactored or a business process that needs to be optimized. Customers can take that information and then work with their teams to implement any suggestion provided now. Additionally, we'll share the root cause analysis with our product and our engineering teams so that any issues or bugs in the product are updated, thereby preventing future issues for other customers. So, proactive service is not just about identifying an issue before it happens, it's about helping customers to implement change to prevent it from happening again. That's three steps that you can take to provide proactive services to your customers. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Salesforce on Salesforce. Please be sure to check out the resources provided and watch the other episodes in this series and we'll see you next time.
