Sales, Meet Service. You Know, You Really Oughta Get To Know Each Other.

Ever walk into an account to pitch an add-on product or discuss a renewal, only to be caught off guard by some outstanding service issue that you weren’t aware of? There are ways around being caught red-faced, like checking with the support department before every sales call to existing customers, but do you really have that kind of time? Let’s face it; it’s always that exception when you didn’t check, that blows up in your face.

The problem with this scenario is that the client may see you as the main contact. They expect you to know everything. When you don’t, it makes the company look bad. When clients see you as the company, it makes you look bad, damaging your relationship with the client and robbing you of your professionalism. This will not help you make sales, especially if the client starts talking to other clients about this disconnect. Fix it. It’s possible. Put Sales and Support on Salesforce.com.

On Client Service Cloud Nine

When your service call center is plugged into SalesForce.com, sales reps can see all service notes and customer service reps can see sales notes.

For Customer Service: Take Service to New Heights

Salesforce.com offers tons of great features to replace traditional call center software with their Service Cloud solution. Your Customer Service team can open and manage cases that come in by phone, email, social media conversations or via live agent web chat, giving your clients a wider range of preferred channels by which to contact the business.

Service Cloud can be integrated to the phone system. This integration will pull the Account up on screen by the incoming phone number and automatically open up a Case. Agents can make notes, use Chatter to consult with other people in the organization, and quickly solve cases.

Do you have a special support process for clients in a selling cycle? You can if you’re using Service Cloud. Now, customer service reps will see which callers are in a sales cycle, with what rep, for which products, with full sales history and can adjust service levels accordingly. Here’s a 15-minute overview video that reviews the benefits of Service Cloud. Service Cloud Overview Video.

For Sales Teams: A Polished, Professional and Knowledgeable Image

Salesforce.com Service Cloud gives you access to all service case information from the Account or Contact records. As customer service reps open and close cases, you’ll be able to see issues, resolutions, number of cases, topics with a few short clicks. You can add comments to any case using Chatter to ask the customer service rep questions, or inform them of details that may not be stored in Salesforce.com.

You’ll have full information before you walk into every single account and service will know when they’re dealing with a client engaged in a selling cycle. Plus, you don’t have to worry about your deal data being accidentally change. You can specify which fields service can edit, have view only access to, or not see at all. Customer Service, you can also lock your fields from edits by Sales.

Service Cloud lets customers access Customer Service a variety of ways – phone, email, social media conversations, via Google Search and Live Chat. This multi-channel support gives you an advantage over competitors offering only traditional customer support and helps to further differentiate your offering.

Service Cloud isn’t free – and is only integrated with Salesforce.com Professional or higher, but it does offer cost savings with its web deployment – no servers are required. It will improve communications between your Sales and Customer Service departments, which would result in better service all around for your clients.

Authored by Yvette Montague, Director of Salesforce.com Training at SalesForce Training.

SalesForce Training & Consulting is a professional services firm and Salesforce.com training firm based in Toronto, with training centers in Boston and Chicago, helping sales teams improve their performance, in front of the computer…and in front of the customer.

by