Slack, your Digital HQ for Service
In July 2021, Salesforce completed its acquisition of Slack, bringing the robust business communications platform into the world of Salesforce products. Because of this exciting venture, sales support materials for Slack are now available to the Salesforce partner ecosystem.
Slack is much more than an internal communication system – it’s a transformative tool that can align companies with a single source of truth across a variety of business operations. With Slack as a Digital HQ for Service, organizations can connect with employees, customers, and partners from a single, feature-rich platform.
In this serries, you’ll find out how Slack as a Digital HQ for Service can help foster genuine customer loyalty by giving service and support teams direct, streamlined access to the experts and knowledge they need to drive fast, accurate, and human-centric customer experiences.
Industry context
When it comes to customer service, rapid response times, omni-channel offerings, and speedy resolutions are essential ingredients in the recipe for long-term loyalty. And more recently, developments stemming from the pandemic have upped the ante for customer experience. Now, customers are relishing the flexibility and convenience born from pandemic-driven business initiatives, like more lenient cancellation policies, omni-channel experiences, and personalized communication.
Service operations need to demonstrate empathy and understanding to satisfy consumers in this new era of expectations. The modern customer wants to be acknowledged as an individual with a unique set of circumstances, not just another ticket to deal with in a pre-defined manner.
As products, offerings, and customer relationships become more complex, so do customer service cases. Agents are increasingly reliant on colleagues outside of their immediate team for the information they need to resolve cases.
To add to that complexity, many companies embrace an omni-channel approach, which can greatly increase the volume of open cases at any given time. Finding the time to meet this demand is difficult for agents, which can lead to burnout and an increase in turnover.
To set agents up for success in the new world of consumer expectations, service teams need to maintain tight-knit collaboration with the whole company. From sales and marketing to product and research, the entire organization needs the flexibility to efficiently resolve complex customer issues in real-time.
With Slack as their Digital HQ for Service, companies can achieve customer-focused organizational harmony by breaking down communication and collaboration silos across the organization.
How Slack as a Digital HQ for Service addresses your company’ pain points
Pain Point 01. Resolving issues faster
Most customer service agents lack direct access to cross-functional partners who have the information and expertise they need to quickly resolve cases. For instance, many agents don’t have the means to bring a case issue directly to product experts or sales teams. The knowledge that agents need to provide solutions is typically spread across a web of disconnected systems, making it difficult for agents to find reliable answers on their own. Your company want to simplify cross-departmental collaboration to help make service operations more efficient.
How Slack, your Digital HQ for Service helps:
Teams can leverage the Service Cloud for Slack app to integrate case data, cross-functional partners, and case swarming — a collaborative approach where insights are pulled from colleagues in other departments — to accelerate case resolution and decrease case escalation. By extending the power of Service Cloud into Slack, agents can automatically push requests into a swarm channel where collaboration with supervisors and experts becomes instantaneous.
As a Digital HQ for Service, Slack acts as a single entry point to the cross-functional teams and subject matter experts (SMEs) that agents need. With topic-specific triage and help channels, agents can seamlessly access knowledge across the organization. This empowers them to quickly discover the highest-quality answer without ever leaving the platform.
The AI-powered search capabilities in Slack enable agents to uncover the answers they’re looking for within any source, whether that be a knowledge base, existing documentation, or previously-resolved ticket.
Pain Point 02. Optimizing agent experience
Between juggling tools, decoding technical information, and managing unstructured workflows, the role of the customer service agent can be overwhelming. Teams are often distributed without a common place to foster team camaraderie, and real-time career coaching opportunities are hard to come by. When you consider these aspects of the customer service agent’s role, it’s easy to see why your company may be interested in elevating the employee experience of their agents.
How Slack, your Digital HQ for Service helps:
As a Digital HQ for Service, Slack allows teams to create dedicated channels based on shared interests, employee resource groups, or geographical location, creating space for the camaraderie and informal discussions that help employees feel engaged and connected to the organization. Slack Huddles can take those conversations even further with audio-first communication that strengthens teams with the flexibility and inclusivity they need to collaborate effectively.
With Slack onboarding channels, managers can create custom learning paths tailor-fit to an agent’s unique needs. By streamlining onboarding and training, companies can help their agents get to full productivity faster. Plus, free-flowing, seamless communication between agents and managers means that coaching opportunities are plentiful.
Because case swarming keeps agents involved in the resolution process, real-time coaching and skill development are a natural byproduct of cross-departmental collaboration. Agents can learn directly from internal experts by staying close to the process until a solution is found.
Pain Point 03. Transforming the customer experience
Many customer service agents have to navigate a cumbersome process when it comes to finding a solution. Oftentimes, customer feedback is difficult to filter and distribute to the team who’s in the best position to act on it. Agents are beholden to a back-and-forth where feedback is passed through a chain of colleagues until it eventually arrives in the right hands. In the midst of this process, the original message can be lost in translation and the customer is left waiting. Your company want to upgrade their service operations to elevate the customer experience and drive long-term loyalty.
How Slack, your Digital HQ for Service helps:
With Slack as a Digital HQ for Service, teams can intelligently capture, enhance, and surface key customer insights by integrating their service and CRM solutions, empowering stakeholders with the information they need to create customer journeys, services, and products that resonate with their audience.
Real-time customer feedback can also be captured in dedicated Slack Connect channels. Slack Connect opens a door for more proactive and personalized care, allowing partners to collaborate on behalf of customers at unprecedented speed. Team members can access a shared environment for communication, plus all of the rich data, decisions, and documents that build as the relationships grow.
Customer data, feedback, and information can flow across people and teams into dedicated feedback channels, ensuring that customer sentiments arrive in the right hands with the context required for action. Collaboration within these dedicated feedback channels can help unlock unique departmental insights that employees can leverage to deliver delightful experiences.
(Soure: Salesforce)
