The Challenge
The company was rolling out new functionality to better serve customers in real time via live chat, as well as provide additional capabilities for sales teams. In particular, they wanted to enable a better customer experience so that when a user engaged in live chat with an agent about a product issue, the customer information would be pulled from their profile to better assist the live agent, or in cases where no live agent was available, automatically create a ticket for support teams to track and follow up with the customer. This data would automatically be pulled and synchronized with the corporate Salesforce instance deployed and shared across multiple business units.
The solution would have to take into account several use cases, including new leads captured into the system, as well as existing customers data to service efficiently.
How It Was Solved
The Sphere team needed to develop new data models to map the interactions between external product systems for charging, existing customer data, and support requests via live chat, using Salesforce Service Cloud. While Salesforce has baseline live chat functionality, the Sphere team needed to expand this to fit the data management requirements for the specific use cases the client needed. They developed the data models, as well as custom code with Apex and JavaScript.
If the incoming chat communication was from an existing customer, the system would pull information from the customer profile in real time so the chat agent could better understand the customer’s previous communication as well as product profile, as well as create a case profile to add to the customer profile. Additionally, new contacts that were not yet customers would be created as a lead, to be serviced via the Marketing team via Sales Cloud.
The Results
The rollout of the update for our client has resulted in noticeable speed improvements in how agents respond to customer cases, and integrated real time information has vastly improved the customer experience since new support requests have the benefit of historical information in context to the profile.
Our client has seen great success with this project, and has prompted the customer to ask us to help improve and automate their sales quoting process (Configure-Price-Quote “CPQ”) in Salesforce Sales Cloud, and we look forward to helping our client in future Salesforce projects.
