While many organizations today focus on the ability to automate processes and capture key data related to servicing customers, it doesn’t always consider the medium in which this internal user experience will be delivered. Often times, organizations will take the “just make it work” approach, meaning manual cut and paste, updating information, double-entry, etc. This approach tends to bog down agents and have them spend more time with procedural actions, instead of efficiently engaging with your customers and providing quality customer service. To help improve agent productivity, organizations should strongly consider implementing Salesforce.com’s Service Console available in the Service Cloud1 platform offering.
Never heard of the Service Console, you say? It is a fantastic tool that provides agents a unified desktop experience and single location in which agents can operate, providing a flexible and modern user experience with all the related information and data needed to service your customers. Gone are the days an agent would need to flip between and look at multiple windows in order to find all of the information needed about the service request, the related customer and contact involved, and all of the related activities that have taken place to resolve this issue. Not only is all the data within a single view, but the functionality Salesforce.com offers as part of the core Service Cloud1 platform is available within a single screen. It’s modern user experience is much more engaging for agents and is similar to modern apps they use in their daily lives (think Facebook and Twitter), increasing the overall adoption rate and productivity of an agent. It’s flexibility is unmatched, providing system administrators to ability to configure the components that are implemented through clicks, not code, allowing for additional and updated functionality to be quickly deployed to users (usually days instead of weeks). You can also build multiple consoles with different functional components and layouts for different sets of agents, depending on the needs.
This all sounds good, but you’re probably wondering about the functionality that the Service Console actually delivers, right? As I mentioned, this console delivers all of the components of the core Service Cloud1 platform. However, there are five key functional components that you absolutely must include when rolling out the Service Console to your agents:
You’re sold, but now you want to know how to get going using the Service Console…so where do you start? First, ensure that your organization has Service Cloud licenses for your agents, as this is part of the core Service Cloud1 platform functionality. Once you know your organization has these licenses available, assign them to the appropriate agent users AND any administrator you want to configure each Service Console. Next, you will want to configure your Salesforce.com org to take advantage of the functionality listed above, including a new feed-based Case Layout. Finally, create a new “console” App within the Setup area, and assign it to the correct user profiles. You should be up and running in no time, and your agents and organization should start to notice the benefits of the Service Console in their daily productivity.