4 Tips For Creating a Self-Service Strategy | Salesforce on Salesforce

Hey everyone, I'm Christina. Today we're sharing how you can create an exceptional digital experience for your customers with self service while reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Then I'll share four tips to help you build your self service strategy with a few examples of how we do it here at Salesforce. If that sounds good, let's get to it. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce, an inside look at our sales, service, marketing and IT business with helpful how to tips you can use for your own business. For service professionals, we'll help you get to the heart of service with tips on things like how to increase agent productivity, how to deliver proactive service, 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 you never miss an episode. So first, what exactly is self service? Self service is when customers find answers on their own without the help of a service agent. Think about when you need to return something you've ordered online and you process the return without having to submit a case. That is an example of beautiful self service. Today, 67% of customers prefer to self serve and we know that number will only increase. Self service isn't just good for customers, it's good for businesses too. By giving customers what they need without the help of an agent, self service saves you and your customers time and resources. With that extra time, agents can focus more time on cases that are highly technical and complex in terms of costs. Companies report seeing a 25% decrease in support costs once they implement a self service strategy. So here are four four ways to use self service to be more efficient while still prioritizing customer experience. Tip number one Know your customer and their needs. A customer portal is an opportunity to provide a great experience for your customers. So this first tip is simple. Design your portal based on your customer, their behaviors, their needs and their preferences. Ask yourself, what are our customers trying to accomplish with your site? How do they prefer to receive information? And don't forget to get granular. We discovered during this exercise at Salesforce that customers are looking to find solutions to their problems. Their objective isn't actually to file a case. In fact, we also discovered our customers love short chapterized videos. Today, self service videos are a big priority for our self service team. Next, you should analyze your customer service data to identify trends such as top case drivers. Do you have articles that cover all of these top items? What cases have the lowest average handle time? Could those cases be better suited Self Serve Last year we ramped up our Multi Factor Authentication resources after seeing a spike in support cases. Remember, Self service is a way to scale your support team's expertise while helping customers get to their answers even faster. Lastly, look at your website's performance. How are customers finding your site? What pages have your biggest bounce rates? What could you do to make these articles even better? And don't forget, after you've implemented self service or if you already have, look at your customers customer surveys to see how you can improve the experience and offer something even more helpful. Salesforce looks at our customers journey all the time and we continue to iterate to make it even more useful. Today, 97% of visitors who come to our Salesforce help page with the intent to solve an issue actually do. This translates into massive savings Tip Number two Invest in SEO Search engine optimization improves the quality and quantity of traffic to your site or specific pages. Digital it's essentially our new billboard, so you're doing your teams and your customers a disservice by not prioritizing SEO. In fact, 70% of our help portal traffic comes from search engines. If customers can't find what they need, it's almost like it doesn't even exist. If SEO is new to you, here are some questions to ask as you're building your SEO strategy. What are the top keywords for searches bringing people to your website? How does your site rank on their search results? What can you do to improve your ranking? Are your pages competing against one another Pro Tip. Videos will increase your SEO performance because they'll keep customers on your page longer. We recommend using videos within self service articles, and it's not just about getting people to land on your site, but also optimizing where they should land on your site. Make sure keywords send people directly to the page that will best help them answer their questions. Tip number 3 Personalize the experience when you go to a video streaming site, you expect content that is catered to you. That isn't any different for your customers. Your customers expect a personalized experience no matter how much or how little they are paying for your product or service. The best way to ensure customers are receiving the best experience is by getting them to authenticate. So when you're designing a portal, make sure you are designing an experience that makes the customer want to authenticate. So think how can you encourage them to provide their username or password? What would benefit them? At Salesforce, we encourage customers to sign in by showing them a preview of what we'll give them access to once they sign in with their Trailblazer id. With Personalization, an elevated experience opens up to both you and your customer. Homepages that include only relevant information according to their purchase. Differentiated experiences according to customer entitlement, customer portals with valuable insights. You can even feature certain support experiences over others, like creating a seamless experience from looking up an article to offering a chatbot or chat support. And don't make a customer re key what they're looking for if you can help it. The result of personalization is a custom connected experience for your customers. A customer comes frustrated, but can leave inspired if you do it right. Tip number four Provide recommendations throughout the journey we all know and appreciate how easy it is when we're looking for something at a store and a sales associate comes to help. Well, what if there was a way to scale this experience? Provide useful tips throughout your customer's journey to make it easier for them to find what they're looking for. You can surface popular articles, suggest channels, or even have a chatbot. At Salesforce, we use Einstein AI to surface recommendations to both customers and and to our support team while we're at it. You know who provides great recommendations at Scale? Your community. Community enables your customers to get expert information quickly, build camaraderie, and doesn't require agent assistance. A win for everyone. We do this through our Trailblazer community, which has more than 3.5 million users. 95% of questions asked in our community are answered within 24 hours. We did it. 4 ways you can utilize self service experiences to drive more efficiency, reduce cost, and support your team with a few examples of how we do it here at Salesforce. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out the resources provided and check out the other episodes in the series. We'll see you next time.