How to: Social Customer Service for SMBs

With so much emphasis on the Social Enterprise at Cloudforce Sydney, many small business owners were left scratching their heads asking what tools are available to them. After all social media has the ability to impact all businesses big or small, right?

At Cloudforce, Salesforce officially launched in Australia their newest darling, Desk.com. Desk.com allows any company- whether you are 10 people or 10,000- to be a social enterprise. It’s an easy to use, easy to set up customer service application in the cloud.

Onstage describing his experience with Desk.com was @marclehmann, CEO of Saasu, who gave his tips for a stellar support team:

• Automation is key: “You are what you haven’t automated”
• Service is a sales channel. Shift the conversation.
• Use reports to see who the stars are on your service team and recognize them.

Marc’s team is using Desk to manage multiple channels from phone, to Twitter, and LinkedIn.

But what small business has time to set up a customer support application? Simon Monk, Director at Travel Insurance Direct said their service application was set up in a few hours. They even skinned their online help center powered by desk.com to match the look and feel of their website. You can take a peek here: http://service.travelinsurancedirect.co.nz/

Bottom line: Small businesses have the ability to have a big impact on their growth by providing quality customer service.  But more importantly, small businesses have the opportunity to level the playing field and take on the big brands by delivering a more socially-responsive service experience than their unwieldy large competitors are able to.   All they need is the right strategy and the right tools.

You can view the whole session slide deck from this presentation here: