How SMBs Can Leverage a Strong Channel Ecosystem to Boost Customer Experience As part of an effort to make it simpler for small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) organizations to provide a holistic customer experience, Salesforce today announced it will deliver a Desk 360 customer support application as a service in the second half of 2016. Katy Dormer, […]
How SMBs Can Leverage a Strong Channel Ecosystem to Boost Customer Experience
As part of an effort to make it simpler for small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) organizations to provide a holistic customer experience, Salesforce today announced it will deliver a Desk 360 customer support application as a service in the second half of 2016.
Katy Dormer, chief marketing officer for Salesforce Desk.com, says Desk 360 is designed to take the friction out of customer support that occurs when the people providing that support have no visibility into either previous interactions or the history of transactions that have taken place.
Because Desk 360 is integrated with the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) applications, Dormer says customer support representatives can now see not only what interactions the customer has had with customer support before, but also every product or service they may have bought. Armed with that information, the customer support staff is in a better position to recommend or upsell that customer additional products and services.
In general, Dormer says services such as Desk 360 will make it possible for SMBs to compete more effectively with larger companies, and once they grow, they can seamlessly upgrade to Salesforce Service Cloud for larger enterprise companies.
The degree to which SMB organizations are ready to turn traditional customer support into a vehicle for selling additional products and services will vary based on the cultural of each organization. But those that are ready to make that shift will not be able to effectively accomplish that goal without giving customer support staff access to the customer record. After all, there’s nothing more disconcerting to a customer than somebody trying to sell them something they already have.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
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