The most powerful part of being a customer service executive using Salesforce for service is being part of a community of the best companies in the world. Salesforce added customer service and support way back in 2004 and customer service executives have been guiding our innovation to deliver the world's best customer experiences ever since. Whether you are a startup disrupting established sectors like Upstart, Belly, Asana, and Surf Air or a Fortune 500 company, service executives like you are using Salesforce to transform customer experiences and grow the reach of their organizations.

The Fourth Technological Revolution, powered by cloud computing and accelerated by Artificial Intelligence (“AI”), provides massive opportunities to supercharge organizational growth - to find, win, and keep more customers. At Salesforce AI, specifically Einstein, presents a once in a lifetime chance to connect with the best service executives in the world and help them guide development of the next generation of Salesforce for Service.

The best of the best service organizations use Salesforce to create an incredible customer service experience. Customer experiences that make it easy to do business with you. Experiences that are highly effective and fast so that you can get on with your life. Even more amazing, the best experiences reduce the cost to serve customers while simultaneously unlocking the power of customer loyalty to drive faster growth.

Here is a list of the top 12 best practices we have discovered in speaking with our most successful customers:

1. Measure the speed of answer and first call resolution rates by channel;
2. Quickly identify the issue at hand and guide their customers to the best channel for resolution;
3. Triage unresolved cases and route them effectively;
4. Utilize Service Level Agreements to consistently meet or exceed expectations - either monetizing different service levels or using them as a tool to ensure customer retention and drive repurchase;
5. Measure customer effort, customer sentiment, first call resolution, and reopen rates;
6. Utilize Knowledge Centered Support to continually improve results;
7. Build career paths for agents based on expertise and proficiency;
8. Measure customer success and leverage each service interaction as an opportunity to promote success;
9. Measure customer cross-sell & upsell;
10. Measure referrals and references as KPIs;
11. Measure retention and repurchase as KPIs;
12. Measure social Word of Mouth (“WoM”) and proactively engage in the customer's community.

Did we miss any? What else are you doing to drive an experience customers love? Does your organization exemplify one of the best practices above? We would love to see what you have built and work with you to share your story with the rest of our customers.