With today’s reliance on digital customer services, it’s vital to empower your service reps with the right systems. But what makes a great platform for service?
In this blog, Geertjan Woltjes, COO at boiling tap pioneer Quooker, shares his thoughts on the most important components for a good consumer experience and how the company’s systems support that.
1. Effective collaboration powers great consumer experience
Whether it’s sharing best practices, informal advice, or specific customer context, collaboration between agents is vital to strong service. And over the last 18 months, we’ve all learnt the importance of enabling employees to work together digitally.
“Collaboration is a big topic,” confirms Woltjes. “Whether you’re working from home or from different countries, every team needs the right technologies to work together.”
As service reps have relocated from call centres to working remotely, informal chat across the office has been replaced with digital messaging. “Good collaboration tools help to reduce emails,” adds Woltjes. “It’s so important that your platform empowers colleagues within and across different departments to collaborate.”
2. A 360-degree customer view is essential
As well as instant chat, screen-sharing, and whiteboard technologies, collaboration is also dependent on providing everyone with access to the right information from the start. Meaning, your platform should provide a single source of truth.
In fact, 79% of service professionals say it’s impossible to provide great service without full customer context. For Quooker, this isn’t a problem. Service reps all have a 360-degree view of their customers thanks to its use of Service Cloud.
3. Efficient field service enables better consumer experiences
We found that 70% of consumers say they still prefer in-person service appointments over alternatives. So organisations must also ensure that their field service team is digitally enabled. They need to be able to access and update customer information whether they’re at a customer site, on the road or have returned to the office or their home.
Quooker provides comprehensive customer visibility for its field agents with Salesforce Field Service. The solution underpins Quooker’s service process from the moment the customer reaches out for support to the engineer fixing the issue.
With Salesforce, the company makes it easier and more efficient for agents to do their jobs. This ensures a better consumer experience. “The experience from the customer's perspective must be as elegant as possible,” confirms Woltjes. “To support this, we use Salesforce Field Service. It enables our service processes to be performed in a seamless and efficient way.”
4. Empowering users improves decision-making
Providing agents and managers with intelligent insights is key to enabling them to make the right decisions. As 77% of service agents report that their job is more strategic than two years ago. And 74% of decision makers say they’re more reliant on data than before the pandemic, providing helpful insights has never been more important.
These insights must be up to date to be meaningful or useful, though, which means Excel worksheets just won’t cut it.
“We have BI (business intelligence) dashboards - it's quite common nowadays,” confirms Woltjes. “We provide our colleagues with all the information that's needed to make their own decisions based on the data from different departments. It's really efficient as we don't have to rely on managers to make decisions for other people, they can do it for themselves.”
With a platform that supports simpler collaboration, more efficient field service, and real-time business insights, service agents can respond more efficiently and accurately to customer needs. As a result, they can work more productively while ensuring a great consumer experience every time.
Find out more about how Quooker and other leading companies are optimising collaboration, field service, and business intelligence with Service Cloud.
