Now more than ever, buyers care about the quality of the customer service they receive from companies. An astonishing 88 percent of customers say that the experience that a business provides is just as important as the products being sold, according to Salesforce 2022 research. In fact, Salesforce found that this customer expectation hit an all-time high in 2022. One of the most effective ways that tech companies and other businesses can improve the quality of their customer service is by diversifying service channels and options, especially via the addition of digital channels. When tech companies invest in letting customers interact and engage on the channels that they prefer, the company becomes better positioned to consistently deliver the quality experiences that customers expect.

The challenge with offering customer-friendly service through a multi-channel service portal is that multiple channels are difficult for the average tech company to manage. For every channel a tech company adds—whether text messaging support and video chat or social media—internal resources tend to get stretched thinner and thinner. Tech companies need a way to make their customer service portals scalable, where disparate channels can be managed in an integrated, coordinated fashion, and where insights from all of these channels are synthesized and leveraged to better understand the customers being served. The optimal solution to these challenges is Salesforce’s industry-leading Service Cloud. Through Service Cloud, tech companies can streamline and simplify management of all service channels, so they can build optimized customer service portals at scale. Let’s explore five ways that tech companies can make their customer service portal scalable using Service Cloud:

Unify all service channels under a single platform

When tech companies introduce new service channels, they tend to treat these channels as discrete entities that get individually managed. Workflows are siloed, and data and insights from the channel aren’t automatically shared outside the team. As a result, every additional channel represents a significant additional investment. Salesforce Service Cloud consolidates all service channels—both existing and new—under a single, integrated system. That means legacy channels like phone, email, and in-person can be managed alongside newer channels like chatbots, instant messaging, and social media.  With Omni-Channel, agents can answer voice calls and social media messages and be assigned emails and cases through one widget in the Service Console.  This integration unlocks efficiencies like data sharing and data leveraging opportunities. Customer service teams can access, update, and manage service records in one central place, and the company can readily scale its customer service operation without a significant investment of additional resources—notably, adding new channels to the existing infrastructure. The cloud-based infrastructure becomes particularly valuable as the company’s customer service demand grows over time. Last but not least, supervisors can access and monitor real-time interactions and utilization metrics through Omni-Channel Supervisor.

Ditch the desk phone

With Service Cloud Voice, a solution created in partnership with Amazon Web Services, companies can abandon hardware for software. Service Cloud Voice is a computer telephony integration solution built natively into Salesforce. It allows a clean integration with your CRM information and allows agents to answer calls alongside the same solution they use to answer emails, cases, and social media messages.  By configuring call routing paths in Amazon Connect, customers can talk to the right agent. Service Cloud Voice is an excellent way to boost agent productivity and make customer service more personable all at once. Agents can also make use of integrated AI-powered suggestions from Einstein within Service Cloud Voice to recommend the best next step based on customer interaction history data in Salesforce CRM.

Incorporate asynchronous service channels

The traditional customer service paradigm is built around an agent working a single case at any given time—typically in real-time and with the customer standing by. But this paradigm is changing, as customers find that not only is asynchronous customer service acceptable, but increasingly among their preferred channels. With asynchronous services, like text messaging and conversations through social media platforms, companies can help multiple customers simultaneously. That’s hugely beneficial to companies looking to inject more scalability into their service portals, and Service Cloud is capable of managing and integrating all of these channels seamlessly. Moreover, asynchronous service gives companies more time to research and get the best answers possible for customers. Requests can be routed to the individuals or teams best equipped to respond, and companies can pull up a complete view of customers before responding to these customers—especially important when responding in public forums like social media.

Invest in more self-service channels

The most scalable customer service channels are ones where customers never communicate directly with a human being. From AI-powered chatbots to searchable knowledge bases to customer-initiated actions within an authenticated portal, self-service channels are emerging as not only efficient but also customer-friendly. Customers want to be able to get answers and take care of smaller issues themselves, without having to reach out and depend upon someone else. Service Cloud, along with the features of Experience Cloud, provides the infrastructure for a public or private portal that can be used to manage all of these self-service channels. Moreover, when customers reach a point where they can’t resolve their issue on their own, self-service channels can be designed within Service Cloud to automatically route the inquiry to the human team best equipped to resolve the issue for the customer.

Continuously analyze customer data

When tech companies unify all of their service channels under one platform, this consolidation does more than just streamline delivery and management of customer service. It also produces invaluable data and insights about customers—comprehensive information about customer sensibilities, preferences, and past interactions with the company. With this data, companies can build 360-degree customer views, then analyze the data to look for strengths and weaknesses in customer service. These insights play a key role in helping companies resolve pain points and roadblocks that are reducing efficiency and hindering the scalability of customer service channels.

When a tech company can readily scale its customer service channels, the company benefits from delivering higher-quality service more rapidly and cost-effectively. The keys to achieving this scalability with Service Cloud are to invest in unifying all channels—both legacy and new—under a single integrated system, to take advantage of asynchronous service channels, to invest in more self-service channels, and to continuously analyze customer data to eliminate pain points that stand in the way of scalability.

Simplus specializes in helping tech companies build customer service portals that consistently provide efficient, cost-effective, high-quality service. To learn more about how we design scalable solutions using Service Cloud, please reach out to Simplus today. We look forward to showing you how to future-proof your service portal to exceed all of your customer service goals.