Most growing companies have a strong focus on marketing and sales efforts and leave customer service process as “an issue that will be solved at a later time”. However, companies realize its true importance when the customers are massively leaving out the door. Meaning that sales efforts and customer acquisition costs (marketing, sales and promotion) go down the drain.Today, customers are more willing to switch providers than before since they have more options to buy products and services. In fact, research by NewVoice shows that US companies lose $41 billion each year due to bad customer experiences.One of the main reasons customers leave is a poor customer service. According to Accenture, 52% of consumers have switched providers in the past year due to poor customer service. Thus, customer support is the frontline in the customer experience battle.Interactions with clients provide not only a space to solve their problems with your products or services, but also a unique opportunity to understand their preferences, behaviors, attitudes, product usability, competitor’s information, etc. It could be an opportunity for cross-selling or up-selling initiatives. Thus, customer support is a key point of contact with the client to gather relevant market data.In order to avoid seeing customers walk out, your company must invest consistently in different aspects: processes and procedures, applications, technology and human resources skills. Improvements in technologies have made applications affordable for companies of all sizes, making it easier to implement and adopt an effective customer-centric initiative.There are various applications in the market that claim to support the customer service process. However, only a few of them have the right mix of functionality, embedded best practices and continuous enhancements to the application.Salesforce.com has two applications that will solve your company’s customer service problems: Desk.com and Salesforce.com Service Cloud.
- Desk.com is a rapid-fire customer support solution, with out-of-the-box functionality to interact with multiple channels of service: Social Channels, Customer Portal, Phone, Online Chat and email.
- Salesforce Service Cloud provides an advance customer service application for those companies that require a powerful solution to meet their requirements.