There are day-to-day administrative tasks costing your support agents time, and therefore costing you money – 5 of which were explored in this article. But simply knowing there are proverbial leaks in your lifeboat isn’t enough. What can you do to plug the leaks and start saving on service costs, without sacrificing the quality of your customer service?
As they say, there’s an app for that! Here are 3 apps built within the Salesforce ecosystem that can save your customer service team time and money.
Email To Case Premium: Removing the Cost of Agent Idle Time
Agents experience idle time while navigating multiple screens and applications to work a case, leading to decreased productivity (Shameless plug: check out our live stream for more details on this). With this in mind, how do you eliminate or reduce time spent clicking through multiple screens so cases can get resolved quicker? Email to Case Premium offers a single screen where agents can access customer information, case history, and communication channels in one place. This eliminates the need for constant screen switching and allows agents to focus on resolving customer issues efficiently. With faster turnaround times on cases, a higher volume of cases are able to be handled by each agent, and more money is saved.
But that’s not the only way Email to Case Premium can save you money. Smart functionality like Canned Responses, which keeps your messaging to customers consistent, and Widespread Issues, which automates collaboration and communication on issues affecting multiple customers – are all designed to make the quality of your customer service a differentiator for your business. When your customer service is standout, you experience better retention and less customer churn. In fact, according to the Salesforce State of Service report, 48% of customers have switched brands for better customer service.
Case Flags: Removes the Cost of Case Prioritization Time
While we’re on the topic of quality customer service, another administrative task siphoning your agents time is deciding what case to work on next. If your agents are using out-of-the-box Salesforce, they are likely clicking through a large list of cases before deciding which one they should tackle next. Once a day, this is a mild annoyance, but most agents are touching roughly 20-30 cases per day. Case Flags offers automation for your case routing process. Using color-coded flags that move to different priority levels depending on your specific business or client needs, the app provides a visual prioritization system for your agents to essentially remove the decision-making step from the entire case handling process. It’s a time saver for your agents, and if you consider the per hour cost of your agent’s time, it can save you significantly in service costs. Plus, it helps you deliver faster service, and (as mentioned earlier), less customers waiting for responses from your team means less customer churn. Not to mention, real-time reporting dashboards give you a birds-eye view of your support team’s performance, so you can set benchmarks, realistic goals, and start improving the entire customer experience. And, according to the Harvard Business Review, it costs 5-25x more to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one, so we’re talking big savings.
File Slayer: Removes the Cost of File Management Time
Your agents are likely spending a minute or two in each case digging through unnecessary files to find what they need. If your customers have social media icons or a company logo in their email signature, those are getting stored in your Files Related list each and every time your customer sends you a case communication. Here at Vicasso, we’ve seen support cases with as many as 500 files clogging up the files related list. Imagine digging through a list of 500 unnamed files to find a single image related to the customer’s actual support issue. What may have started as a minor issue, can actually compound into hours each week for a single support agent. And, if you have a team of 20 agents, you’re talking major payroll costs flying out the window.
Once installed in your Salesforce org, File Slayer takes over this task automatically. The native Salesforce app will comb your files related lists to detect and delete unnecessary files like social media icons and customer logos, so all you're left with is the files you actually need to work the case. With automation functionality enabled (aka “Slaybot,” our AI-trained neural network), future instances of the same image will automatically be deleted and even historic instances of slayed images will be removed as well. This enhancement to your file management system means agents can find exactly what they need, when they need it. No more time (and money) wasted digging around for the correct attachment on a case. It also can reduce unnecessary Salesforce storage costs, if you’re hitting standard storage limits.
Customer service challenges are a natural part of any business, but with the right strategies and solutions, they can be overcome. By simply addressing agent idle time, case prioritization, and file management with the right apps at the right price, you can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer service team.
All three of these cost-effective apps offer a free trial and can be found on the Salesforce AppExchange. Considering they are all native to Salesforce, you’re also saving pre-acquisition costs, setup costs, and maintenance costs. To quote another Salesforce partner S-Docs in their article How Native Salesforce Apps Reduce Total Cost of Ownership: “The solutions you choose to extend and enhance [Salesforce] functionality should increase the ROI you already get from it.”
FAQs
Are there any specific requirements or considerations needed before implementing these apps within a Salesforce environment?
Implementing these apps within a Salesforce environment typically requires some level of compatibility assessment to ensure they align with your existing Salesforce setup. This may involve checking system requirements, compatibility with your Salesforce edition, and any potential conflicts with other installed apps or customizations.
How customizable are these apps to fit the unique needs and workflows of different businesses?
These apps all offer configuration to make them work for the specific needs of your service teams. For example, Case Flags custom aging speeds allow you to set different workflow rules for different customer tier levels, SLA rules, and more.
Can the apps seamlessly integrate with other existing tools or systems used by the customer service team, or is there a potential for compatibility issues?
Our apps are 100% native to Salesforce, so are able to be integrated with any tools or systems that can be integrated with Salesforce.
