At Salesforce, we’re on a path together with our customers. For service in particular, that community of customers includes the support agents on the frontlines of providing stellar experiences.

Historically, technology providers have targeted executives at the highest levels of the business as the customer service buyers. But we at Salesforce see an opportunity to develop user-led, design-driven customer service technology centered around the agent. We’re designing our tools and technology for those support agents so the technology that powers their day-to-day jobs can be smarter, easy to use, and help them be more productive. Excelling in the modern business landscape relies on ensuring that customer service agents are engaged and happy. Because engaged agents create experiences that foster happy customers.

Four percent of the modern workforce works in a contact center (Jobs4America) of some kind, but there doesn’t exist a community of interest where these support agents have a forum to talk about the modern issues and developments facing their industry. That’s where the idea of the Service Trailblazer Tour started — Salesforce wanted to develop a community of customer service agents and understand directly from the agents that use our service product how we can make it even better for them. This community started at Dreamforce — the largest cloud computing conference in the world – and now we’re taking it on the road and bringing an engaging event experience directly to the agent, where they work every day. So far we’ve visited companies in Tucson and Tempe, Arizona and Austin, Texas, and we’ve had the incredible opportunity to interact with over 2,000 service agents.  

We gave agents the opportunity to get hands-on and interact with our Service Cloud technology, but also brought food, fun, and games, such as Console Karaoke in our Service Supermobile. There were a few lessons we learned along the way:

1. Get agent feedback on your technology roadmap early

One of the agents who we spoke to during the tour had been working for her company for 50 years! She was incredibly excited for the opportunity to get hands-on with the service technology that the company was procuring for the agents. To be able to play around, experience and give input, and ask questions about the service technology before it lands on her desktop was an invaluable experience that she was extremely appreciative for. When service leaders design for your agents and engage them in conversations, everything you want your service to be — smart, fast, personalized — will materialize.

2. Agents are extremely passionate about their companies

Many of the agents we spoke to truly love the company they work for and it’s mission. They saw customer experience as an opportunity to get their foot in the door and learn more about what the company does, and in many cases fell in love with the service role. These same agents then found a real passion for being able to help customers solve problems, both big and small, every single day.

3. There’s an agent appreciation movement beginning

At every stop on the tour, it’s been clear that the appetite for an agent appreciation movement is quite strong. Companies haven’t always understood or acknowledged that happy agents = happy customers, but now that message is resonating quite strongly, and it couldn’t come soon enough. We were overwhelmed with the reception and heard time and time again from agents, “No one has ever done something like this before.”

These responses were incredibly heartwarming to witness, but it got me thinking — when was the last time you celebrated your agents? Sure, you may distribute Starbucks gift cards on occasion, but true agent appreciation goes much deeper than that. It’s an ethos embedded into the culture of the call center and includes the right technology to enable agents to do their job to the best of their ability and create personalized relationships with happy customers. Agent appreciation needs executive buy-in, including opportunities for executives to sit in the contact center and take calls – not only does this give them an inside look at agents’ day-to-day experience, but it’s also a way to get up close and personal way to learn about the customer in a way that focus groups cannot offer.

Interested in playing host to the Service Trailblazer Tour and creating an amazing experience for your agents? Let us know!