Episode 8 - Retaining Customers through Effective Service in CRM
Let's dive into the final part of this Attract, Attain, Retain series related to CRM, where we will focus on retention.
One tried-and-true quote is that it's ten times more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one. You may find yourself tasked with retention as the primary goal of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), making it a higher priority than marketing or sales.
Salesforce has the largest market share of the CRM business in the world. In their system, customer service is facilitated via the case object. Some CRMs call these trouble tickets or issues. The goal is to resolve these cases if they must be created in the first place. An ideal scenario is to head off the creation of cases by resolving a customer's potential issue through what is known as case deflection.
You may have encountered this yourself when reaching out to a support department within an organization. You may be asked to state what your problem is and then be presented with various knowledge articles, asking if any of these address your question or concern. They are trying to deflect the creation of cases by providing self-service knowledge articles and ways for customers to solve their problems. This is an example of self-service.
The challenge is that it is very hard sometimes to state what your exact issue is, or you may not know the correct terminology that the company expects. Therefore, search capability is very important, not only for exact matches but for what are known as fuzzy matches or things that would be considered the same but called different things.
The more a company can make its case deflection user-friendly and conversational, whether through voice or chat, where the customer is not required to jump through a lot of hoops, but the system figures out what they need, the better. However, this ideal scenario is not often the case in reality. This is why I am so excited about AI and its potential impact on improving our lives by understanding our issues and solving them rather than forcing us to listen to endless options and recordings.
There are many ways that customers may reach out through various channels, similar to the marketing side or the beginning of the relationship where you have different marketing channels. There may be email channels for your cases or email-to-case inside of Salesforce, where customers can email support at your company name.com, and those emails can be configured to flow into your Salesforce instance and automatically create a case.
Salesforce can be configured to figure out where that email is coming from. If we have that record in our Salesforce instance tied to that email address, we will connect that case with that contact record that the email belongs to. If not, we may set it up to create a new contact or at least capture their name, email address, and issue. Typically, in a case, you'll have a subject and a message. The subject is similar to an email subject, providing a high-level overview of what the case is about, while the message gives more detail.
Another important field on a case object is its Status. The Case Status ties into the underlying Support Processes set up inside Salesforce. In previous episodes, we talked about lead processes driving different status designations on leads and how sales processes control the different stages on Opportunities in Salesforce. This third and final process type inside Salesforce is known as Support Processes, which work on case records and drive the different status designations on cases.
You may have different Support Processes for handling cases depending on the type of case. In prior examples, I've talked about different types of vehicles and how you would market and sell an electric vehicle differently than a gas vehicle. The same would likely be true for servicing a gas versus an electric vehicle. You would not have electric charging status designations on a gas automobile case, but you would potentially for an electric automobile case. Whenever you need multiple processes for your different support processes, there would be a need for introducing multiple support processes and Case Record Types.
There's often automation needed inside a CRM system to perform intelligent routing of cases. Some basic default assignment behavior can be set, such as a round-robin assignment, where everyone receives the next case, ensuring no one person gets too many cases. More intelligent routing may be required for certain cases, depending on their complexity, which may go to a higher tier level of support through escalation rules. There are also options for various spoken languages.
Whatever interaction comes through, whether via chat, email, or call, needs to be logged in the case. The Case Status designation aims to be much like the goal for a lead, which is for it to be converted. The goal for an opportunity is for it to be closed won. The goal for a case is for it to be closed successfully to the customer's satisfaction.
That customer service goal is often stated as 'one and done,' where there's only one touchpoint, not assigning further work for the customer. Good companies providing good customer service will take care of issues without leaving it to the customer to call back repeatedly. Organizations striving for zero or one touchpoint interactions provide better customer service overall. This breeds loyalty over time and positive word of mouth, creating a virtuous cycle where exceptional customer service can help increase revenue by retaining customers.
At the beginning of the marketing process, new leads are created for your marketing department, and new opportunities are created for your sales department. This is where you don't have three departments as isolated islands or silos that don't communicate, but instead, you provide for cross-departmental cooperation, tracking even your support reps.
There's a lot of implications with AI's current and future impact on customer service. We are at the beginning point of AI conversing at an indiscernible level with humans and being able to intelligently answer questions. There are still issues with AI hallucinations, but obstacles are being overcome through breakthroughs and solutions such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). You'll see more chatbots and voice agents that are AI-driven.
There's a lot of debate about the ethical use of AI and whether you should make known to your customers that they are talking to an AI representative or try to fool them into thinking they're talking to a human. Some AI voice systems are hybrids, where the voice is artificial intelligence, but a human may be behind the scenes clicking buttons on an interface, depending on where the conversation is going.
As AI improves, it can do many things better, quicker, and more effectively than humans. Effectiveness will dictate how these systems play out. Back on the service side of things inside CRMs and customer relationship management, beyond the different status designations on cases and intelligent routing of cases based on the type, skills required, or languages spoken, support processes depend on the types of cases and case record types depend on the fields needed on those cases.
Effective CRM systems like Salesforce can surface knowledge articles to representatives based on case data and previous resolutions. These can be turned into knowledge articles so that when an issue arises that not everyone knows about, it can be quickly resolved. In high-volume call environments, you may need console applications inside the service cloud of Salesforce. A console application is a single browser window with multiple tabs for quicker navigation between cases.
Field service will also be significantly impacted by AI. This involves fleets of repair trucks and technicians in the field, with AI used for intelligent routing based on case load, location, and the abilities and tools of support reps. Real-time AI feedback is another recent development, where cameras and phones can be pointed at issues for AI to assess and troubleshoot in real-time, even translating languages as needed.
All these advancements in CRM and AI aim to help retain customers by providing excellent customer support. Companies that quickly adopt these technologies will retain customers more readily and attain new ones.
Looking back on the past three episodes of this series, we see that marketing, sales, and service are interconnected. Salesforce's processes and record types are crucial when providing different types of marketing, sales, or service. AI adds a powerful boost to productivity, and those companies that adopt it early and effectively will succeed.
I'm excited to see how various companies approach AI, particularly Salesforce's AI roadmap and the Einstein trust layer. Be sure to check out the resources below, and please do me a huge favor by leaving a review to share this podcast with others who need to hear it!
