For any organization, there are various aspects that you need to take care of. And support service is an important one among them. When it comes to IT support services, case management holds great importance.
What is Case Management?
Case management (also referred to as a ticketing system) is a vital aspect of an IT organization. Case management involves providing customer service by handling the cases (or tickets) that customers generate.
Case management happens when a customer encounters an IT issue or requests an IT service. The support staff then uses the case management software to optimize the customer experience throughout the resolution process. The IT support team takes care of critical case management key performance indicators (KPIs), including response time and resolution times. The service team may also need to maintain a knowledge base to compile common issues and reduce resolution time.
Case management is important for an organization because inefficiencies in case management cause unprecedented service downtime. The mismanagement of cases causes unnecessary escalations, which can increase support costs for the business. It may lead to reduced ROI and profitability. To add to that, delays in case resolution can also impact customer satisfaction levels.
Salesforce is a popular CRM out of various CRM systems due to ease of development, scalability, and customization. If you are a Salesforce-based business owner and looking for Salesforce case management best practices, you are at the right place.
This post will guide you through the various practices you can adopt for Salesforce case management and make it efficient.
So, let’s start.
1. Encourage Self-Service to Avoid Overload
Digitally smart people today seek solutions to their problems before they get in touch with the support team. So, you can also encourage them to solve some minor problems themselves by providing a fully comprehensive knowledge base.
Yes, a knowledge base is crucial for any organization because customers can refer to it for common issues. They can read articles, FAQs, etc., and watch video tutorials to answer their common queries. This prevents unnecessary creation of cases by them which helps reduce the burden on your Salesforce case management team.
It is also essential to keep updating your knowledge base. Keep analyzing the most common issues, compile them along with the steps for their resolution, and keep them in the knowledge base.
2. Set the Priority of Cases - Rightly
Organizing and prioritizing cases is as important as solving them. Have a proper grading system to organize your cases according to urgency. There are two common models of grading that organizations use.
- First-in-First-Out
People also call this model the “first-come, first-served” model at times. In this Salesforce case management model, the support team handles cases in the same order as the customers generate them. First case first, second case second, and so on.
- Pick and Choose
This model, “Pick and Choose or VIP,” is where the support team handles customers’ cases based on the case’s urgency.
Based on your requirements, you pick and stick to one model. Alternatively, you can switch between both models if required. No matter which model you pick, your ultimate aim should be to make your customer support 100% satisfactory for end customers.
3. Always Track Salesforce Case Management Progress
Without staying abreast of your Salesforce case management progress, you can’t determine the success rate. Therefore, keep track of all the cases that customers create and monitor their status regularly.
For better clarity, segregate your cases into different categories based on the stage they are at. Typically, the cases can be:
- New/Open
- In Progress
- On Hold
- Closed
Work out and follow consistent criteria to classify any case in one of the above four categories. Also, make sure that a customer doesn’t generate a case twice to avoid duplication and unnecessary effort.
4. Utilize Case Information to Grade Urgency
There should be a way to grade the case urgency according to the information provided. The team should check for the customer’s contact information, the description of the issue and assess its effect on the customer’s business. All this information can help you gauge the urgency of the case and grade it accordingly.
Developing a standard procedure to analyze and determine ticket urgency helps ensure that the support team aligns priorities with the customer’s needs.
5. Prevent Junk Emails
Don’t let junk emails enter your help desk. This is because junk emails can be a big problem for the support team, and filtering them manually can be time-consuming.
Sometimes, due to these junk emails, there can be instances that your team overlooks actual cases that may need a timely response. To avoid this kind of problem in Salesforce case management, there should be a mechanism to eliminate the need for manual filtering of junk emails. There should be a way to configure spam filters for the support desk.
6. Streamline IT Service Request Validation
Before your IT staff start working on any case or request, validation is a must. Validation has different components, which include:
- Ensuring that the support agent who passes the case to the IT staff is authorized to do so.
- Ensuring that the end recipient of the service genuinely requires the service requested.
It is, therefore, advisable to have one or two persons who validate the case a user generates before sending it to the IT support staff. The department heads can help analyze the cases and determine whether they are self-solvable or not.
Accordingly, they can pass it on to the staff or pass the relevant information link to the customer to help them solve the case themselves.
This won’t only prevent unnecessary overload of cases but also make Salesforce case management faster and better. The team will be able to focus more on valid cases that genuinely need intervention.
7. Avoid Lengthy Email Conversations
Try to collect as much necessary information at the time of the creation of a case. It will help avoid lengthy email conversations after your customer creates a case. You can use a portal or case management software to configure request templates to ask customers all the relevant questions when creating the case. This will help back-and-forth conversations with customers over the phone or via email and speed up the process.
8. Segment Your Cases Well
The better an organization segments support tickets to meet SLAs constantly, the better is Salesforce case management. When you segment cases accurately, it helps ensure that incident reports, service requests, etc., about a particular technology or the customer journey stage, reach the most qualified person.
In other words, you should categorize the routing of cases based on their type. For instance, you can route hardware problems to your hardware team and software problems to your software team. If there is any service inquiry related to billing, shipping, etc., you can route them to the logistics team. Whichever way you segregate, there should be the ability to grade support requests with segregation. The lesser the first-response time, the better is the customer engagement.
9. Stay Proactive to Avoid Unwanted Escalation of Cases
There is a need to avoid the escalation of cases to a higher support level. This is because it increases the overall cost of case resolution. Hence, be proactive and keep a check on the tickets that are approaching Service Level Agreement violations. Sometimes, case escalation may also happen if your team unintentionally misses a case and the deadline to solve the case is about to approach.
So, make sure that your IT support team doesn’t take too long to resolve the more minor cases, don’t miss any cases, and escalate tickets only when genuinely required.
10. Create a Proper Support Workflow
Define a proper support workflow - a system that describes how the support staff should handle new cases as the customers generate them. A support workflow gives a predictable set of steps that the support team can follow for Salesforce case management and tackle different cases. It also helps manage customer expectations in regard to how you handle cases.
11. Follow the Data and Track KPIs
Take care of service metrics also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You should measure the KPIs including average response time, overall resolution time, average overall Salesforce case resolution time, case escalation rates, and self-service usage rates.
12. Empower Your Support Staff
Last but not the least, empowering your support staff is vital. You should equip your team with the right tools and technologies to help them streamline Salesforce case management.
Maintaining a knowledge base, handling cases, compiling reports, etc., centralizing them all can help. This is where a Salesforce customer portal solution comes in handy.
If you also want to remove bottlenecks in your Salesforce case management and make it seamless, our Salesforce customer portal solution can be the right fit.
CRMJetty - Your Smart Salesforce Customer Portal Development Partner
Now that you know how Salesforce case management is an integral part of the Salesforce organization, it’s time you revamped it. There are various Salesforce case management best practices, as we elaborated above.
If you are looking for a feature-rich customer portal to help you optimize your business operations, CRMJetty has got you covered. Our Salesforce customer portal is a scalable and secure customer portal solution for Salesforce. This can help you surmount all your productivity challenges in Salesforce case management.
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- Real-Time Synchronization - With real-time synchronization between the portal and Salesforce CRM, you need not change anything in two places separately.
- Easy Flow of Information - You can leverage the on-demand exchange of information between CRM and the portal without any hassle.
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- Reduced Operational Costs - It is an easy to configure portal where all the entities are managed centrally. This, in turn, lowers your operational requirements and cost.
- Mobile-Friendliness - Be it you or your users, mobile-friendliness enables both to access anything they want on the go.
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With 14 years of experience in portal development, we can build a portal exclusively for your needs. Our development team can gather your requirements and figure out how to cater to them. If there is no need for heavy customization, they can customize our portal to fit your business. If the requirements are way too different, we can build a roadmap for your portal’s custom development. Our team starts development, gives iterative updates to you, and comes up with the final product after accommodating all the run-time feedback. After that, our QA team tests it to confirm that it is ready to hit the market. Once we hand your custom portal over to you, it’s ready for your use for Salesforce case management. We also provide limited-time support to help you get familiar with features if you request.
Let’s get started to smoothen your Salesforce case management.
Source : https://www.crmjetty.com/blog/salesforce-best-management-best-practices-follow-2021/
