The pressure on customer service teams continues to increase. Customers expect immediate assistance, whether through digital self-service resources or by talking to a person about complex issues. I am looking for simple and specialized help.
However, the traditional customer service model of escalating difficult cases to managers or other teams no longer works. Actually, 82% of customers expect to be able to solve complex problems by talking to just one personaccording to the Salesforce report “Client Connected Status”.
The old way of delivering care often results in long resolution times and multiple referrals for complex cases. This is frustrating for the customer, as well as inherently inefficient for the organization.
The solution is Case Swarm, a collaborative care model which spreads the load for solving complex customer problems across the organization. At Salesforce, we’ve changed the way we support our customers by adopting Case Swarm. To do this, we use the newest addition to Salesforce Customer 360: Slack.
Connect with the right experts, every time
In a traditional model, Customer support teams are usually grouped into tiers, based on their level of experience or expertise related to a specific product. A customer with a complex problem often moves from a level 1 support agent to a level 2 team member and then to a level 3 agent.
The customer experience has obvious drawbacks: the time required for resolution is longer and clients often have to repeat information about the problem to multiple case handlers. Arriving at the resolution, continuing experience reduces customer satisfaction.
A traditional tiered model requires an overly complex structure, with multiple customer transfers. Customer service agents can waste time on cases they don’t have the means to resolve, reducing productivity. Advancing a case from one officer to the next level can seem like a lack of accountability and management. Unless they receive formal training, Agents do not learn new skills or advance in their careers.
Recognizing these problems at Salesforce, we set out to solve them by adopting a new model of intelligent Case Swarm. We have redefined our strategy by creating cluster pod, which allow customers to access greater expertise through the assistance of a team of technicians. We use Service Cloud to route the case to a swarm pod manager who hires the necessary Salesforce experts.
Case Swarm puts the customer at the center of the support experience. This type of support model is designed to ensure that customers interact with only one person in charge of the case, someone who has immediate access to the expertise needed to quickly resolve each issue.
Default collaboration, no scaling
Each of us cluster pod supports a different Salesforce product, though some peel offer specific skills or specializations. Service technicians work together on their own peel and they can also be passed on to others peel to offer help. No need to escalate a complex issue – everyone works together by defaultso that case handlers can quickly connect with the appropriate person or persons to resolve the issue.
We use Slack as a collaboration tool because of its flexible and feature-rich environment. Slack allows cross-functional teams to communicate and make decisions in real time, regardless of their location. Because it will be integrated with Service Cloud, your full case history will be easily accessible through these conversations, so you cancreate a simpler agent experience in a collaborative place.
Slack offers ours peel of aid the flexibility needed to work together to quickly resolve even the most important problems. Here are its features: if a technician needs help on a case, his manager peel Submit a swarm request in the appropriate Slack channels, asking other pods, cross-functional industry experts, and admins to start the Case Swarm process.
Workflows built into Slack automate the processes that support agents use to bring the right experts into the swarm pod and collaborate on the case. Slack bots help monitor and edit channel activitypost messages to channels, react to member activity, and make channel messages interactive via buttons.
This approach allows our technicians to resolve customer issues faster, while at the same time avoiding the complexity and multiple steps of a traditional care model for the latter.
Consequently, Salesforce saw a 26% reduction in case resolution times since introducing a tiered support model through Case Swarm with Slack, even though we saw an increase in clients and caseload over the same period.
Learn, educate and help in real time
With the Case Swarm process, our technicians regularly collaborate with the technicians of others peel and at the same time they work closely with highly qualified experts in their fields. Everyone is constantly learning from each other, optimizing their skills in their areas of expertise and expanding their knowledge in various fields.
Meanwhile, those responsible for the peel They can coach and help their teams in real-time and collaboratively instead of the traditional assessment-based management approach.
Consequently, the company gets a more specialized support team, while the technicians get more skills and responsibilitiesmaking progress in their careers.
Scale Case Swarm to new teams
After all, Case Swarm has improved the dynamic between our support teams, managers and clients. Looking ahead, we plan to standardize and scale Case Swarm across the entire Salesforce landscape.
After seeing its success in customer support, it’s not hard to see how Case Swarm can benefit other teams. Loose channels, for example, already provide readily available feedback loops for product groups. They can see problems as they develop, spot trends, and adopt new ways to improve our customer-facing products.
We have great people working in security, operations, finance, sales, product development, support and other departments. We are already a highly collaborative organization, but Case Swarm could take us to a new level, allowing our staff to easily share their knowledge, experience and resources in real time.
Learn how to give your customers a fully digital, end-to-end experience they’ll love with Salesforce and Slack