How to turn a customer service nightmare into a sweet dream with Salesforce Field Service

Customer service remains paramount for businesses. Studies say that when a company is guilty of at least two negative experiences, 76% of customers are done. To avoid loss of profits and reputation damage, organizations are looking for the best ways to fix their interaction with customers. Sometimes the right technology suite is just what they need.

A story of a customer who was trying to stay cool

Imagine the following situation.

It is an extremely hot afternoon, and due to an unfortunate turn of events, you’re a couple of miles away from your lovely, cool home. Now you’re walking home in the heat. Longing for a life-saving cool shower, you dream of spending the rest of the day in your air-conditioned paradise.

You get home exhausted from both the heat and the rush. But as you come through the door, you realize something is not right. The whiff of cold air that usually greets you at the entrance is missing. You hastily do the relevant checks and realize that the air conditioner is broken, and even though you try a few things, it seems like you cannot fix it on your own.

You quickly find the contact information for the air conditioning company and call them. A woman with a pleasant voice picks up the phone but it turns out that she’s from the sales department, so instead, she gives you customer support’s e-mail address.

You write them a detailed message, asking that a repairman be sent to your house. But after a few hours, there’s still no response. Meanwhile, you manage to dig out another phone number—this time for customer support—and call them directly. You ask whether they are experiencing high-volume demand because there’s been no reply to your email. The operator apologizes, saying that sometimes customer emails get lost. She tells you to expect a call back, since she needs to find out if there’s an available HVAC tech. Sometime later you receive a call, assuring that the repairman will be at your place “as soon as possible.” You have no clue when they show up, so you have to reschedule your appointments.

After more time passes, you decide to take a quick shower. Of course, this is exactly when the repairman arrives, so you have to get out of the bathroom and dress as quickly as possible. You receive an apology for the late arrival, apparently because the HVAC tech had to travel far from their previous appointment.

The repairman inspects the malfunction and fixes it in less than one minute! He explains that this is a common issue, and you could have rectified the problem yourself. You feel frustrated, and swear that you’ll never call that company again...

We told this story from the customer’s point of view, because putting yourself in customers’ shoes helps to understand their needs.

Now imagine you’re managing the air conditioning company. Without diving into the strategic aspects of things, let’s list the most obvious challenges with customer service you'd have to fix.

Three common challenges with customer service

1) Failure to deliver an omnichannel customer experience

Initially, the customer called the company. However, phone support isn’t enough to keep up with current consumer needs in the digital world (Neither are emails). Instead, the customer could have sent a live chat, an in-app message, or used a chatbot if the company had provided these means of communication.

2) Poor appointment scheduling

Making a customer keep an eye on the clock is never a good idea. Back and forth phone calls with long response time don’t work, either. To keep up with customer preferences, appointments must be booked at the customer’s own convenience, from anywhere, at any time of the day. Otherwise, customer satisfaction and loyalty can drop, resulting in a high churn rate.

3) Lack of real-time engagement

As mentioned in the story, the customer could have solved this problem with just a little help—real-time assistance provided by phone or live video chat. Alternatively, having a knowledge base at hand, he might have been able to fix everything himself. To sum up, all these problems boil down to one—insufficient tools and technology, which leads to the risk of losing customers, revenue, and reputation. This is where SoftServe, partnering with Salesforce, steps in.

Customer service done right

Let’s introduce Salesforce Field Service, an extension of the Salesforce Service Сloud, and discover how its optimization tools allow an enhanced customer experience.

First, Salesforce Field Service enables the integration of all communication channels into one, unified system. The Omni-Channel feature ensures that all customer calls and messages go to your support agents with notifications about each new case. In addition, the requests are forwarded only to currently-available agents, which minimizes response time. Your customer’s messages or calls never get lost or misdirected.

Second, the Dispatcher console provides a full view of all of the mobile units, enabling appointment scheduling that takes into account mobile workers’ availability, their present location, and relative travel time to the customer. If a support agent needs to make any adjustments or send a different repairman, these changes can be made with a simple drag-and-drop, and the system rearranges the rest. Your customer can then happily manage their own time.

A Knowledge Base can provide your customers with self-help articles and advice— and they might not even have to call customer support to solve their problems in the first place. But you can also offer your customers real-time engagement to solve minor problems on video calls via Visual Remote Assistant.

These are just a few of Salesforce Field Service features that can help businesses take their customer experience to the next level.

How SoftServe helps

Simply investing in technology isn’t enough to optimize end-to-end service operations. Because Salesforce is a multifunctional and highly customizable platform, having the right process advisor and implementation partner is a must if you want to ensure optimal gains as well as interoperability with other systems.

SoftServe delivers modernization through our expert implementation of Salesforce Field Service as part of the Salesforce Service Cloud suite. The Salesforce team at SoftServe began in 2018, and has achieved great results and gained experience in different industries by successfully completing more than 20 projects.

Developing a solution powered by Salesforce’s field service system, our team meets the client’s precise business requirements while creating a best-in-class experience for customers. Here’s the story how we recently helped a US-based financial services tech company improve field service operations.

Let’s talk about how SoftServe and Salesforce Field Service can enhance customer service in your company.