#CRM news delivered just for you. How to deliver first-class customer service? It’s certainly a mingle between devoted agents and the appropriate tools and technology. But none of them create great customer service on their own they have to work together. Therefore, this weeks’ highlights include: 5 Apps that will help you improve your customer service and boost customer satisfaction and retention.
1) Instagram Ads Go All In with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce is offering a whole new set of tools for marketers to engage with customers on Instagram!
Ever since 2013 Instagram started offering advertising spots to its user community that was built up around 150 million users, nowadays its user based doubled and they decided that it was time to boost this offerings, and they are doing so by adding Salesforce to the formula. Now Instagram, will be delivering data to the Marketing Cloud through its advertising API, in order to funnel all the data gathered and deliver it to its corporate customers.
A lot of recognized global brands have been taking advantage of this platform in order to engage with their customers in new and even more personalized ways, setting up presence as influencers in this channel; with Instagram analytics now they can really leverage this platform and improve the way advertising is delivered.
The tools that come along with this integration are part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
- Ability to buy and manage advertising on Instagram through social.com, and can use the same Active Audiences CRM data.
- Social Studio tracks campaign performance on Instagram; it also assists community management teams deal with responses and comments.
- Social Studio provides tools for monitoring trends, engagement, and overall sentiment.
- Ability to solve customer service issues presented on Instagram through both Marketing and Service Clouds as well as syncing CRM data with Salesforce’s Active Audiences tool for honing in on key demographics and Social Studio for publishing campaigns and customer engagement.
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/08/salesforce-marketing-cloud-instagram.html
2) Salesforce Ventures backs up marketing startup Autopilot
Autopilot marks another major investment for Salesforce Ventures; Autopilot is a marketing automation software startup that offers a universal tracking code targeted toward digital marketers, designed to capture data and potential leads from websites and apps, funneling that information into marketers’ existing smart lists and workflows via Salesforce’s CRM platform.
This software makes marketing easy and accessible, whether it’s through email, direct mail, or text messages. On top of the basic marketing automation functions such as running email campaigns, Autopilot can trigger special thank you cards when someone accepts a deal, or follow up with people who failed to open your email the first time.
Autopilot claims that only 4% of all companies use marketing automation and they want this to change, as Sharkey, Autopilot CEO, said “We want to bring marketing automation to the masses and democratize it as much as possible from insider baseball,” that is why this software is one of the more affordable marketing automation software out there, intended to “democratize” marketing technology to small and medium sized businesses.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/salesforce-ventures-backed-marketing-startup-autopilot-raises-another-7-million/#ftag=YHFb1d24ec
3) Salesforce Marketing Cloud earned top position in the G2 Crowd Report
Salesforce Marketing Cloud was named Leader in G2 Crowd Summer 15 report, receiving strong customer satisfaction scores with a large market presence. This report compiles customer satisfaction as reported by users, along with vendor market presence as determined from public and social data, to rank products based on customer surveys gathered from G2 Crowd’s online user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. The Summer 2015 report is based on data from more than 850 reviews written by business and marketing professionals.
According to the report 87% of users rated Salesforce products 4 or 5 stars and 90% of users believe Salesforce is headed in the right direction. Caren Carrasco, CRM Manager at Luxury Retreats commented: “The [Salesforce Marketing Cloud] is by far the best tool I have ever used as a Marketer. The product is reliable, powerful and handles automated emails [very well].”
You can view the full report here.
4) Qstream(R) Delivers First Predictive Sales Capabilities Engine for Salesforce.com
Qstream, makers of mobile enterprise software for improving high-performance sales teams, announced the industry’s first predictive sales capabilities engine for Salesforce.
The combination of the two platforms allows sales leaders to augment pipeline, forecast and other CRM data with a critical, real-time view of sales capabilities to transform how companies use Salesforce.com to proactively manage and measure team performance. From within Salesforce or Salesforce1, sales reps respond to scenario-based challenges that reinforce the sales capabilities that matter most, while basic game mechanics deliver a user experience that’s highly engaging and non-disruptive to selling time. Qstream’s Predictive Insights Engine™ then analyzes thousands of response data points to provide continuous real-time management updates, trends and comparisons that help sales leaders.
“CRM represents a large part of business technology budgets, and any product that increases the return on that CRM investment becomes valuable and worth serious consideration to a CRM buyer frustrated with its usage levels,” noted Kate Leggett, principal analyst for Forrester Research; being this one of the main concerns of Salesforce, that is why they keep in continuous growth, investment and partnering up with different companies in order to provide with a more complete services to all of their clients.
5) App of the Week
This week’s app is dedicated to customer service experience. It has been proven that customer service is one of the main pillars of every company’s success and Salesforce Blog released this week an artcile recommending 5 apps that could make your customers (and even your employees) happier:
- ShiftExpert: provides employees, shift managers and planners with complete visibility of who works when, and how this planning affects the service, position coverage and budget. Publish shifts across all channels, including mobile devices and wearable technology.
- inContact’s: maximizes agent efficiency & provides a unified customer experience across all channels. Agents are made more efficient through automated screen pops, automatic detailed call logging, and built-in click-to-dial. Salesforce objects, such as cases, opportunities, and leads can also be routed. This allows you to have a clear view of agent utilization, as you track work they do in the CRM.
- HeyWire: 2-way SMS texting for sales and service agents from your current business numbers. 52% of your customers prefer texting to current communication channels. Customer service text messaging expands your omnichannel communication strategy to mobile devices. HeyWire makes LiveText easy to implement and manage.
- FieldExpert: is a Salesforce-native field service application that streamlines the full service lifecycle from service appointment booking, through smart scheduling, work order management, mobile field execution and reporting. FieldExpert enables organizations to automatically schedule and manage field service employees in real-time, dramatically reducing field service costs.
- SurveyMonkey: helps you create, send surveys, get responses, and analyze results directly in Salesforce. Make smarter decisions by tracking your customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), employee satisfaction and more. Auto-send a survey after a campaign, event, training, or customer interaction.
Here’s a little bonus: if you want to read more about customer service and how great customer service delivers actual and better results, we recommend you this article “From Sales to Support, Great Customer Service Leads to Real Business Results”
If you want to learn more go to the Salesforce Appexchange web-page or Contact us for more information by clicking here