Part of the fun of owning Service Cloud Strategy at Clear Task is getting to participate in industry events and conferences. We like to stay on top of innovative trends in the industry at large, not just the Salesforce ecosystem, because it’s critical to the success of our clients. Learning and sharing are part of our DNA, that’s why we attend events like the CSI Member Summit and in two weeks will be attending the 10th Annual Contact Center Exhibition (ACCE) in Seattle.

Read on for our thoughts on why we think the ACCE in particular is such an important event to attend.

Why is Clear Task attending this year’s ACCE?

1. Top industry conference speakers

• ACCE is a once a year opportunity to hear from a wide range of experienced and talented speakers
• From contact center managers to analysts to technology specialists, there’s something for everyone

2. Site tours of local contact centers

• Want to see how customer focused organizations like Starbucks and Alaska Airlines run their contact centers?
• Get rare and unique access to learn from their strengths and challenges on site in Seattle

3. Sharing our expertise in contact center best practices and technology

• Representing Clear Task, I look forward to meeting and sharing knowledge with fellow attendees and participants
• As usual, we’ll come prepared to talk to our implementation and platform experience with Service Cloud and KCS

4. Taking the pulse of contact center growth, trends, and pain points

• There’s no better way to learn what’s going on across the industry than listening to the people on the front-lines
• At ACCE – real contact center professionals get to share their recent experiences and successes through Case Studies

If that doesn’t pique your interest, you might be in the wrong industry.

If you already know you’re going – reach out on the conference social network and I’ll see you there.

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

Live Agent product is easy to configure, but rolling out chat takes time and planning, though, especially around customer experience.

Whether you’re thinking about it for the first time, or looking to improve your existing chat solution, we’ve put together a short guide to get you started.

1. Who and Where?
   • Your first step is deciding who gets to start a chat and where.
   • Is the chat button open to any visitors on your site, only logged in customers, or maybe embedded directly in your software product?
   • Live Agent supports mobile friendly design and can be included in a mobile app

2. Pre-Chat Form?
   • The faster it is for customers to connect with an agent, the happier they will be.
   • However – you may need to collect some information before starting the chat.
   • If you do need a form, keep it simple and pre-populate data from cookies or other sources wherever possible.

3. Skills and Routing?
   • How specialized are your agents?
   • How much information do you need to route a chat to the right place?
   • Keeping the number of skills as low as possible will make long-term administration easier.

4. Screen-pops and the Console?
   • If the customer starting the chat is logged in or has provided their contact info – the auto-query functionality will allow you to pop the exact contact record to the agent.
   • It is also a best practice to create a case at the same time as initiating the chat.
   • If a case has been created automatically, you can pop this record for the agent as well.

5. Knowledge and Quick Text?
   • Do you have an existing knowledge base for your agents?
   • If so – consider adding a shortened “Chat Answer” to each article.
   • Quick Text can then be used for other ad hoc messages, greetings, questions, and closings.

If you can answer each of these questions, you’re heading down the right path to live chat success! Have any questions of your own? Feel free to get in touch!

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

It is a great honor to announce that Clear Task has been named one of the 2013 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times & Silicon Valley Business Journal. We work hard every day to make Clear Task a great place to work, and we are humbled by being recognized for it.

As Clear Task’s HR Manager, I have strong beliefs on company culture. In my opinion, company culture is not defined by values written on your walls or bullet points in a presentation. Culture is ubiquitous. It cannot be controlled or created but can be influenced and nurtured. The values you create, the bullet points in the presentation, the content of your handbook all communicate a tone, perspective and attitude about your company. Those are all signals of your culture.

I’d like to share some Clear Task principles that may help you as think about your company culture:

Our culture evolved as we added new people to the team. Each person brings a unique blend of personality, heart & talent no one else can. It’s was important to us to recognize and value each unique contribution. We care about our culture because we want our employees to have a remarkable experience here. We want them to grow, succeed & have fun doing it. And as our CEO puts it “do the best work of your life with a team you love to work with”. Come join us!

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

Over that time we’ve helped our customers use the cloud to best:

• Listen to and serve their customers.
• Manage, motivate, and recognize their employees.
• Enable and engage their partners.

We just launched a new Clear Task website that encapsulates 3 key beliefs that fuels our passion and contributes to our success.

1. See More Do More
2. Be Where your Customers Are
3. Hire the right people

See More Do More

Regular readers of our blog know we talk a lot about doing ‘more’ with Salesforce. Seeing the possibilities whether it be with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com, or Work.com and having the skills to make it a reality. Our belief is that many companies only scratch the surface in understanding the extent to which Salesforce can be used to transform their business. Our passion is working with companies to help them See More of what is possible and Do More with the tools they have.

Be Where Your Customers Are

We like the spirit of Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts when she says, “you have to be totally connected with everyone that touches your brand”. We express it by saying you need to Be Where Your Customers Are. Listening. Responding. Connecting. Speaking you customers language in places chosen by them, not dictated by you. Through social media sites, inn game/app support or mobile apps.

Hire The Right People

Our success and the success of our customers’ projects, only happens when, as Jim Collins in Good to Great puts it, you ‘get the right people on the bus‘. I’m delighted to see so many pictures of our amazing team of talented, fun, tenacious problem solvers incorporated into the new site. They make it happen. They continually dedicates themselves to our customers, their own career development, and to the community they live in. And they carry out their work using our proven implementation approach.

7 years later and I’m still very excited about helping companies transform themselves using the power of the cloud. Excited about seeing the amazing possibilities for our customers. Excited about Doing More with Salesforce technology. Excited about having the best team.

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

Using a platform like Salesforce means that customer support and sales get to share the same space and use the same data. The shared environment is a huge advantage over systems that only focus on one business area (like RightNow or Zendesk). To maximize sharing between both groups – we’ve put together some common use cases and best practices to get you started.

What Can Sales Learn From Support?

No one has their finger on the pulse of the customer relationship quite like support. Whether it’s a new deal or a renewal – sales needs to access to the latest and greatest customer info if they want to win:

• Recent support case trends give insight to overall CSAT and possible training opportunities
• Major open issues can have huge impact on new deals or renewals
• Enhancement requests may represent a sales opportunity

With some basic config changes it’s easy to start sharing, but the goal should be exposing critical information without overwhelming sales with day to day support issues.

Here are five steps to get you started:

• Expose the cases related list on the account page layout for sales – sort by date opened
• Create a workflow rule to notify account team members of P1 cases
• Create a link to a dynamic case trend report from the account page layout
• Include a CSAT/Case component on the main sales dashboard
• Flag accounts with workflow updates if cases are created after support has expired

If you want to realize the full value of having both sales and support on a single platform – start with these native configuration options and get sharing today!

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

As experts in innovative customer support, our team is knowledgeable about a wide range of support products (not just Service Cloud). In fact, we’ve worked with many fast growing companies who started out with a lightweight support tool like Zendesk when they only had a handful of agents.

Many of those same companies have come back to us as Zendesk fails to scale with their growth and increasingly complex support needs. Why do our clients end up moving from Zendesk to Service Cloud? Read on for details from our implementation experience (looking for a comparison of Service Cloud and RightNow? Check out our post on moving to Service Cloud from RightNow).

Having completed many end-to-end migrations, here are three common reasons for a support organization to choose Service Cloud over Zendesk:

1. 360 Customer View

• Service Cloud is fully connected to the rest of the Salesforce platform – allowing companies to build a truly 360 degree view of their customers, with sales, support, marketing and all other data in one place.
• Zendesk is 100% support focused. While integrations to CRM systems like Salesforce exist, they are limited and require development resources to modify or extend.

2. Customization

• Whether it’s developing fully branded customer experiences or taking agent efficiency to the next level, the Force.com platform offers an unparalleled level of customization and development options. 
• Zendesk provides many well designed features out of the box, but when companies grow and need to modify their public knowledge base or portal (for example) they find they are limited to basic CSS changes.

3. Enterprise Class Support

• Service Cloud provides a host of features to support both SMB and Enterprise. From a streamlined view of interaction history with the Case Feed to complex Entitlements and SLA tracking, Service Cloud supports organizations of all sizes.
• Managing anything beyond a few ticket views, simple routing logic, and a limited number of queues, becomes cumbersome and painful in Zendesk. The system also lacks basic features critical to enterprise level support (3rd party CTI support, guided scripting, KCS, the list goes on)

In short – while Zendesk offers great out of the box support features, many of our clients end up quickly hitting a wall. Having scalability challenges of your own? Leave us a comment or get in touch!

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

The first step in building a great mobile experience is choosing the right approach. Native mobile applications have a range of advantages and tradeoffs, but many of our clients choose HTML5 or hybrid development so they can build once and support devices of any size.

With our experience developing mobile applications on the Force.com platform (and now Touch), we’ve learned there are three key areas for success.

1. User Experience

• Clear Task believes strongly in the “Mobile First” principle of design. If you are developing a brand new site or experience – thinking about mobile first helps you focus on the core value and functions users will want.
• Toolkits like jQuery Mobile and Sencha provide a huge library of UI elements and navigation templates that can get you up and running quickly with a responsive design that adapts to any device size. Salesforce has also released a mobile app for Chatter Answers and is working on one for the Public Knowledge Base.

2. Performance

• To support your slick mobile UI – you need blazing fast response times and smooth page transitions. The right back-end architecture can make or break the front-end experience.
• When building HTML5 apps – using JavaScript Remoting in conjunction with standard Visualforce can take speed to a whole new level, without sacrificing functionality.

3. Security
   

   Native mobile login page for Communities.

• For hybrid apps – Salesforce provides an excellent OAuth plugin that handles authentication and session management, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
• For pure HTML5 – you can take advantage of the standard Salesforce login page or authentication framework for customer/partner portals. Salesforce Communities even has a mobile version of the login screen.

Focusing on delivering high quality in value in these three areas is a big part of what makes our client implementations successful.

For an example of a live mobile experience we’ve built – download Kabam’s mobile game “Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North” and navigate to customer support. You’ll see a mobile knowledge base and support experience built with HTML5 and Force.com Sites.

If you’re thinking about developing a mobile experience for your users (and you should be) – start by deciding your approach (Native? HTML5?) then make sure you nail each of the areas above for real adoption success.

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

There are 3 main ways that employees can use Work.com to advance their careers:

1. Ensure Your Goals Are Known: One of the best ways to ensure your manager coaches you effectively and helps you to reach your professional goals is to ensure they are aware of what those goals are.  All employees create annual and quarterly objectives in Work.com. This allows employees to communicate their drive to improve in certain areas and work with their managers to come up with a concrete plan to get there.

2. Share Your Successes: Once goals have been set, employees can post updates to their managers to let them know how they’re tracking against their professional development goals. We stay informed of their accomplishments, allowing us to easily keep upper management informed of our team’s successes.

3. Gain Recognition: We heavily utilize “Thanks” badges to give appreciation for work well-done. When someone at Clear Task does good work, colleagues show their appreciation by giving them “Thanks” badges on Chatter, giving everyone in the company visibility to their achievement.

All of this factors into what Work.com calls Performance Summaries. In December, my employees filled out their performance summaries, and then I went to read their self-evaluation and review them. In doing their reviews, I learned that Work.com aggregates all of their objectives, action items, notes, private feedback and thanks they have received. I could easily see who had been really successful and should be recognized with a raise, or better yet, a promotion!

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

The unfortunate impacts of this are lower revenue, increased expense, and less profit.  We believe with a few basic principles in place there is a better way.

Just 5 years ago, I would have killed to have access to the metrics we’ve built today.  At the click of button I can easily see:

• What new projects are coming and when
• What type of resource and skill mix is required for these new projects
• Billings and utilization across the entire team across whatever time period I desire
• Which accounts and projects are key drivers of our bookings and revenue
• What resources have capacity opening up when
• The total backlog of project work in flight

The world was not always like this. I have worked in many companies where it would have taken a small village to get even a few of the items above working on a real time basis. There are a few core steps that have enabled us to apply such great leverage to our business:

1. Establishing a solid Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution and using it for everything it’s good at – project tracking, resource tracking, time tracking, invoicing, etc
2. Maximizing the strengths of Salesforce in opportunity management and forecasting, workflow, reporting, dashboards, etc.
3. Integrating PSA summary data back into Salesforce so it is highly accessible and can influence front office execution

Sound really simple and straightforward? It generally is, however, few companies invest the time in process definition, system integration and forethought around summarizing actionable data to the right audience.

Time is what a service organization sells and arguably is our most valuable asset.  We recommend investing a small amount of it to put the right information front and center and it will pay you back tenfold. It has for us.

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices

When moving from a service and support focused system like RightNow – our clients often have questions about what functionality will be different in Service Cloud.
I’ve blogged in the past about general migration best practices but today I’ll be focusing in on a key difference between the two systems: Platform vs Product.

Having worked directly with implementations of RightNow, we understand the powerful functionality it offers within the narrow scope of customer service and support. The reason many of our clients have moved from RightNow to Service Cloud is not a lack of functionality – it’s the lack of scope.

Service Cloud: Platform, Not Product

Here are some of the key benefits our clients gain by moving from a product like RightNow to the Service Cloud platform.

1. More visibility

• Moving to Service Cloud means Support is fully connected with sales, operations, marketing, and the rest of the company
• That means easier access to key customer data like contracts, open sales deals, implementations, and everything else (without any costly or messy integrations)

2. More engagement

• The customer support experience is no longer just cases and knowledge
• With peer-to-peer support from Chatter Answers, product roadmap discussion in Ideas, and customer/partner collaboration with Chatter, just to name a few – Service Cloud allows you to provide a richer, more valuable customer experience

3. More flexibility

• Force.com provides a wealth of customizations options, both clicks and code
• Our clients can build applications on the platform to support their unique business processes – something a narrowly focused product can’t support

Hopefully I’ve established a pretty clear difference between product and platform with these three points. If you’re interested in more, look for a blog on more specific RightNow and Service Cloud feature differences in the near future.

Clear Task Insights - Salesforce.com implementation strategies and best practices