Your rationale for choosing Salesforce was simple: Salesforce, by far, is the leading CRM in the world. And Salesforce Service Cloud has the potential to totally transform customer experience by automating processes, streamlining workflows, and supporting customer service agents. Users have found high value in using Salesforce & have received significant returns on their investment.
With time however, the post-rollout gaps between expectations and reality have tended to widened in several ways:
- Agents are viewing multiple screens (not an integrated, single console view) and are without a 360-degree view of the customer.
- Omnichannel and self-service to deflect calls, while intended, are yet to be realized.
- Legacy systems—and their integration with Salesforce—are proving sub-optimal, as are the processes that make up the workflows surrounding those systems.
All this has meant bad news for the agents who are experiencing poor levels of performance and are—despite the best of efforts—unable to achieve the results in the Key Results Areas (KRAs) necessary for contact center success.
Sound familiar? Perhaps too familiar?
The Result of Things Not Going as Planned
The impact of good plans going bad can sometimes be cyclic in nature, resulting in a downward spiral of missed opportunities and bad outcomes. Contact center performance crumbles, resulting in frustrated agents scrambling to fill the gap with manual efforts to handle the higher workloads—but with little effect. The whole platform becomes another “system of record” rather than something that truly empowers customers and makes your brand shine.
Eventually, the growing lack of faith in the technology supporting contact center operations could turn into a reluctance to renew & retain existing systems – and force for alternative & costly investments.
You get the picture.
Is there a silver lining?
In most cases, it is NOT the platform itself that is deficient but the implementation and configuration of the technology. It’s the business processes and operating agreements that are defined, designed, and implemented around the tech that fall short with the evolving business needs.
And that is where the real opportunity for remediation and improvement lies. While the challenges may be real, they are nothing you (perhaps in collaboration with the right partner) can’t fix.
Now What?
One would say that identifying the cause(s) of your loss of Salesforce value is “half the battle”. But it’s not. It is just the beginning— a first step, albeit an awfully important one.
To maximize the value of Salesforce so you can maximize the value of your contact center, you’ll need to identify and configure the solutions in Salesforce, initiate an ongoing improvement plan, and tighten the end-user feedback loop so you can better listen and act on feedback.
If you do, you can achieve business results and customer experience outcomes that markedly outpace your competition. For example, our data-based experience suggests that optimizing the value of your Salesforce investments in the contact center can mean a:
25% improvement in agent productivity
25% reduction in customer complaints
24% faster case resolution
21% improved CSAT from self service
20% better first call resolution
