Omni-сhannel in Salesforce: Setting the Standard for Customer Service
This article was originally published at Twistellar.com
Modern consumers demand convenience, connecting with companies from anywhere using smartphones or laptops. The true advantage emerges when customers have multiple options tailored to their preferences — a solution to the common pain point of limited accessibility.
Unfortunately, few businesses provide this diverse range of communication touchpoints, leaving customers yearning for flexibility. Offering customers choices not only defines exceptional service but addresses the pain points of limited access, elevating the customer experience and enhancing the quality of your product or service.
60% of customers express that their interactions often resemble communication with distinct departments rather than a cohesive company.
Additionally, 66% frequently need to repeat or reiterate information to various representatives.
48% of customers have switched brands for better service, and an overwhelming 94% agree that excellent customer service significantly boosts their likelihood of making repeat purchases.
Source: Salesforce “State of the Connected Customer,” May 2022
The challenge is apparent: how do you boost omni-channel Salesforce productivity without overwhelming frontline agents?
Many turn to process automation, now a cornerstone for almost 80% of high-performing service organizations.
Let’s delve into its strategic implementation and impact.
What’s the Difference between Multichannel and Omni-channel Customer Service?
Omni-channel and multi-channel customer service involve interacting with customers across various channels, but their approaches differ.
In multi-channel customer service, a company provides support and engagement through multiple independent channels. These channels may operate in isolation, and the customer can choose the most convenient one. However, the challenge lies in ensuring a consistent experience across these channels, as they may not be integrated, potentially leading to fragmented interactions.
Omni-channel customer service takes a more integrated approach. It focuses on providing a seamless and unified experience across all channels. In an Omni-channel strategy, customer interactions are interconnected, allowing for a consistent and cohesive experience as customers move between channels. This approach emphasizes continuity, enabling customers to transition between channels without losing context, and ensures that the organization has a holistic view of the customer journey.
Overview of Omni-channel Salesforce Customer Service
The service industry focuses on three key aspects of omni-channel support, i.e., being:
- Thorough
- Consistent
- Connected
This means engaging with customers across any channel, maintaining a consistent service experience, and having a unified view of the customer through a single CRM.
A genuine omni-channel service center lets customers easily connect with support on different channels, giving support agents quick access to a complete customer profile. It’s about avoiding separate departments’ complexities and resolving issues promptly.
At the same time, according to Salesforce’s ‘State of Service’ Report, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more important in Salesforce’s customer service toolkit. AI, which can gather essential information and suggest optimal steps, has seen an 88% increase in adoption since 2020, from 24% to 45% among service decision-makers. This emphasizes the growing role of support going omni-channel in Salesforce ecosystem.
Omni-channel Case Routing in Salesforce Service Cloud
Organizations often need a combination of case assignment strategies, especially global service teams requiring simultaneous criteria like product specialization, language, agent availability, and location.
In Service Cloud, Omni-channel Routing, or case assignment or case distribution, is the intelligent automation that ensures the correct Salesforce records reach the appropriate owner at the right time. This process involves various strategies, including assigning cases based on agent skills, capacity, language and handling diverse input channels.
To determine the need for extending omni-channel routing, ask yourself and your sales team a few questions:
- What if cases need to be reassigned after creation?
- How can case assignments reflect real-time workload, not just workload at the time of the assignment?
- How are cases weighted in terms of complexity, and can a unified score improve assignment accuracy?
- Are business hours respected to avoid assigning cases when agents are offline?
- How can additional inbound channels seamlessly incorporate the same complex assignment logic?
Queue-Based Routing
In this method, agents are grouped into distinct queues, typically reflecting a single skill or specific business aspect, such as Billing or Technical Support.
Omni-channel then assigns work items to these queues, with agents being members assigned tasks based on queue priority.
Smaller companies favor queue-based routing with fewer product offerings and agents operating in confined geographies. Its simplicity makes it an attractive choice for streamlined setup and efficient operations.
Skills-Based Routing
Skills-based routing involves tagging agents with specific skills and assigning work items based on these skills.
This method proves highly effective for larger organizations with extensive product ranges, complex skill sets, and multilingual support requirements.
Agents are matched with work items requiring their unique expertise, optimizing the allocation of tasks.
Leveraging this native Salesforce feature is advantageous for organizations navigating diverse product portfolios and catering to global audiences, ensuring a targeted and efficient approach to customer support.
External Routing
External routing is the solution if you already have a preferred routing system and are introducing Salesforce into your workflow. Your company can retain its established routing system by seamlessly integrating third-party routing through a partner application with Omni-channel.
Skilled developers can leverage Salesforce’s standard and streaming APIs to write code that facilitates the collaboration between third-party routing systems and Salesforce.
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