DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO SELF-SERVICE COMMUNITIES WITH SALESFORCE

SERVICE IN THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMERBlame it on Frank Urich. In 1947, he opened the first self-service gas station, located in Los Angeles. No longer did people have to wait for an attendant to fill’er up. That self-service trend lives on as consumer expectations continue to change because of the way we interact with technology today. From consumers using mobile check-in features at hotels and airports, mobile banking, eCommerce, and ordering food from the restaurant table using a tablet, self-service is proliferating at a staggering rate.

Initially, businesses adopted self-service because it was cost efficient. Now, however, self-service has become a customer experience imperative. Today’s consumers are digitally savvy, well-informed, and more demanding of brands than ever before. When consumers have a problem, they want a quick response, demand complete transparency, expect a personalized experience, and for the problem to be solved in one seamless support interaction. As consumer demands evolve, it will be impossible to satisfy them with traditional support tactics and processes, and thus service organizations need to undergo a complete support transformation. The key to a successful self-service strategy is understanding the entire customer journey to seamlessly deliver a service experience that continues to meet changing customer experience goals, engagement tactics and new digital technology demands.

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Not investing in self-service will become a competitive disadvantage.

Not offering self-service puts you at risk of lagging behind your competition. In fact, 70% of customers around the world expect a company website to include a self-service application. While most companies meet this expectation, in 2015, 55% of customer service interactions still required humans. In two years, the percentage of people interacting with humans will have decreased to 34%, with the majority using automated help.

Are you unsure if the demand exists with your customers to justify an investment in self-service support or are still struggling with where to start? These are two burning questions we often get from clients trying to decide when the timing is right to add self-service to the support mix; when in fact, you may be further down the road with self-service than you may think. If you have a FAQ page, you’ve already delved in, so don’t let information silos or the ever-changing content stand in the way of delivering the self-service experience your customers want.

Here are a few to ask to help you decide if the time is right for self-service:

• Are your competitors offering self-service support?• Are you trying to reduce support or call center costs?• Is agent productivity a growing concern?

• How would you rate your average time to resolution for cases?• Is there a demand to scale support operations without adding

headcount?• Have you experienced a dip in CSAT scores?

In addition to improved business efficiencies and an enhanced customer service experience, a self-service program can also benefit your own customer support team. By creating a knowledge base for the mundane topics, you free your team to address more complex problems. Increasing employee engagement in turn leads to greater employee satisfaction and retention. And that positive attitude trickles down to your customers.

For all of the business benefits to be gained from offering self-service options, it may feel like you’re skimping on service with the do-it-yourself option. But that’s not how consumers see it. Seventy-three percent of consumers said they should have the ability to solve most product and service issues on their own. Couple that with the 65% of all generations (and 69% of millennials) who say they feel really good about the company and themselves when they can answer a question or solve a problem related to that company on their own.

Independent, intrepid, and impatient customers want to find answers, and self-service options give them that ability.

OVERCOMING ROADBLOCKS TO SELF-SERVICE SUCCESS

Communities power our personal lives. Customers also have a wealth of information at their fingertips if they tap into the power of communities. From local restaurant suggestions using OpenTable to looking for a new job on LinkedIn, online communities deliver a personalized experience, provide access to contextual information, and enable collaboration all at the same time.

In the retail industry, we’ve seen how customer reviews influence the buying decisions of others. Customers trust other customers – often more than they trust retailers – and in self-service communities they see each other as allies in solving problems or supporting brand advocacy.

WHAT DOES AN EFFECTIVE SELF-SERVICE COMMUNITY LOOK LIKE?An effective self-service community needs to be easy for users to find and use, and must have a clear purpose and path to deliver customer value. Customers can access it from anywhere, including their mobile devices. A self-service community gives customers a network of peers who can answer questions, but also enables unresolved questions to be escalated with customer support agents. Here’s a rundown of other must-haves for an effective self-service community:

• Seamless user experience – branding, usability and navigation

• Knowledge base

• Case deflection

• Social collaboration

• Topics and discussion groups

• Ideation

• Elements of gamification

• Mobile access

• CRM integration

CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES: GOING BEYOND TRADITIONAL SERVICE

Long recognized as a leader in the social collaboration space, Salesforce launched Community Cloud to connect its system of record with engagement tools to serve a system of intelligence – all on the Salesforce platform – to help companies connect with customers, partners, and employees in a whole new way. Since its launch, more than 7,500 active communities with more than 55 million members have been created and the product continues to evolve with Community Builder Templates and Lightning Components designed to enhance the user experience making it easier for organizations to start a community.

BECOME A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC COMPANY USING SALESFORCE

more than low performers

42%

4x

of high performers are using self-service platforms,

PHASE 1:

EXPOSING KNOWLEDGE IN YOUR COMMUNITYMore often than not, a single FAQ page alone will not serve as a viable customer support method. You need content in the form of a knowledge base that contains relevant, current, accurate, and reusable information. Not only do your customer service reps need to have access to the content – so do your customers. That’s why exposing a knowledge base is often a great place to start with a self-service community. Beyond that, self-service community enhancements can expose knowledge in a variety of ways as customers search the community, ask questions in discussion groups, or customize case deflection processes.

Knowledge can come from other sources outside of a public knowledge base. Creating targeted discussion groups using tools like Chatter, Salesforce’s social collaboration solution built in to Community Cloud, is one way to encourage peer-to-peer support and customer engagement in your self-service community. If questions go unanswered, these questions can easily be escalated as support cases handled directly by support agents.

This section of the guide explores the four phases and elements of cultivating a robust self-service community using the Salesforce platform.

Client Success Story

NEXTGEN HEALTHCARENextGen Healthcare offers a suite of health IT solutions. Its support organization had adopted Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) methodologies on its own, but its existing service platform was at end of life.

As part of an overall Service Cloud implementation, Salesforce Knowledge played a key role. More than 11,000 articles were migrated and exposed in an authenticated customer community powered by Salesforce Community Cloud. We helped identify, map, and configure more than 15 article types, including two that would be featured as ‘widgets’ on the self-service community home page. In addition, through custom work, relevant articles were always displayed before case creation could take place to improve the deflection process.

We helped identify and create knowledge contributor and champion roles, so that the article lifecycle could have approvals when needed. The roles also created the foundation for an article quality index (AQI) process that allows the champions to provide feedback to the contributor. Both the roles and the AQI process are part of NextGen’s KCS methodology.

The Salesforce-powered knowledge solution for agents and customers has increased case deflection by 14%, increased customer satisfaction, and boosted agent productivity through self-service support.

PHASE 2:

CROSS-SELLING ANDUP-SELLING CUSTOMERSBeyond the most basic self-service support interactions – knowledge and cases – the real value of a customer community is the opportunity to expand into other areas to grow your brand. Think of American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In the pyramid on the right, customers’ most urgent needs serve as the foundation and must be met before the next phases of community adoption can occur.

The next step to creating a vibrant self-service community is turning the platform into a place to do business with your customers. Using Salesforce Community Cloud, you can transform your self-service community into an eCommerce engine. As members come to the community to research product information and ask questions in discussion groups, the addition of widgets or buy buttons allows them to discover products and buy them directly from within the community.

COMMUNITYADOPTION

PHASE 3 :

FUELING PRODUCT INNOVATIONCustomers who are part of a vibrant self-service community can provide a wealth of innovative ideas that lead to new products and features to move the business forward giving you a competitive advantage and increasing customer loyalty. Think of it as crowdsourcing ideas from your customers. In 2010, when Starbucks sought to decrease its reliance on paper cups, the company launched a Beta Cup challenge, inviting customers to submit ideas. Similarly, LEGO asks its customers for new proposals for sets, and invites them to vote on their favorites. How did both of these brands do this? Using a self-service community.

80%of successful new product ideas come from existing customers

Client Success Story

OpenX TechnologiesOpenX, a global leader in digital and mobile advertising technology, needed a more efficient way to engage and serve its customers as its business expanded. We built a self-service community using the Salesforce Community Cloud platform that allows customers to view cases, find answers to product questions, engage with peers, and submit ideas to the community.

The online community has enabled OpenX to effectively scale customer service and increase case deflection with a self-service support channel. Additionally, the Ideas Lightning Component, a custom widget we built to enhance out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality, will help the brand fuel product innovation and improve customer retention and satisfaction.

PHASE 4: RECRUITING CUSTOMERS AS ADVOCATESAt the top of the Community Adoption pyramid shown in phase 2, community participants become your brand advocates – actively answering questions posed by other customers and becoming your partners in profit. Here, at its most evolved state, a self-service community not only helps improve agent productivity and increase customer satisfaction with support, but it now becomes an engaging community to sustain relationships and fulfill a shared purpose across marketing, sales, and service – achieving customer success.

GETTING STARTED WITH A SELF-SERVICE COMMUNITYBefore you embark on a quest to enhance your knowledge base or implement a community solution, lay the foundation to ensure your self-service community will truly enhance customer satisfaction and not have hiccups that drive satisfaction down. Here are four tips to make that happen.

1. Make a plan, starting with a clear mission statement. Recognize that your self-service community, as well as how you create and manage knowledge, are part of your customer service strategy. They should be integrated in your overall understanding of the customer experience, not be an endgame in themselves. This means articulating the purpose of a self-service community and clearly communicating your service organization’s need to make this change.

2. Understand that this new process changes the way you do business. Once you ask customers to interact, it’s an imperative that you listen and respond – make active employee participation essential in

ensuring customers are heard and conversations are (gently) guided to a positive outcome. Consider having a dedicated community manager to monitor the support group.

3. Have a plan for communication. The phrase, “If you build it, they will come” from the movie Field of Dreams does not apply to a new self-service community. Work closely with your marketing team to develop a marketing communication plan, create the necessary content to inform your customers it exists, and educate them on how to use it to drive better adoption.

4. Determine how you’ll measure success. What key adoption metrics will you use, and how will these metrics change as you grow a self-service community? You can look at the number of self-service cases created in the community versus through phone support, but how can you measure the level and quality of customer engagement within the community? Consider using gamification to award points to customer advocates for high levels of engagement.

5. Don’t let the quest for perfection slow you down. Continuous improvement through measurement and analytics will help you take the customer experience from good to great. While having a robust self-service community with all the bells and whistles right off the bat would be great, consider how you can tackle low-hanging fruit to quickly address common customer issues or support challenges with your community. You can always add additional features and enhancement once you see what topics are getting the most engagement, what your members searching for, and whether those searches lead to results.

TACKLE SELF-SERVICE WITH PERFICIENTPerficient is a Salesforce Service Cloud Master with Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) certified staff trained to help you maximize the benefits of Salesforce and deliver measurable value with your customer service solutions.

We were an early adopter of Salesforce’s portal and community solutions and are a member of the Community Cloud Ambassador Program. With more than 140 portal and community implementations under our belt, our deep Salesforce platform expertise, paired with our digital experience capabilities, has enabled hundreds of innovative brands to connect and engage with customers, partners, and employees in a whole new way.

RESOURCES:1 Why the Future of Customer Service is Self-Service, Fast Company, May 19, 2013.

2 Why the Future of Customer Service is Self-Service, Fast Company, May 19, 2013.

3 Why You Need to Rethink Your Customer Service Strategy, Gartner, March 2015.

4 Knowledge-Centered Support, KCS Academy.

5 Employee Engagement Research, Master List of 32 Findings, Kevin Kruse,

September 18, 2012.

6 Customer, Serve Thy Self, Aspect Software, April 2, 2015.

7 90% of Customers Say Online Reviews Impact Buying Decisions…and Other Hot

Topics, Ryan Pinkham, April 12, 2013.

8 Why Self-Service is a Must for Today’s Consumers, Salesforce, June 30, 2014.

9 Why Create Self-Service Communities, Salesforce.

10 Winner of Starbucks’ Coffee Cup Challenge Isn’t a Coffee Cup, Fast Company,

June 17, 2010.

11 Lego Ideas: How It Works, Lego, April 2016..

12 In Search of Product Success, The Insight Advantage, April 2016.

ABOUT PERFICIENT Perficient is the leading digital transformation consulting firm serving Global 2000® and enterprise customers throughout North America. With unparalleled information technology, management consulting and creative capabilities, Perficient delivers vision, execution and value with outstanding digital experience, business optimization and industry solutions. Our work enables clients to improve productivity and competitiveness; grow and strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers and partners; and reduce costs.

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