How To Use Salesforce For Customer Success & Retention

If you're struggling with customer retention, remember that loyal customers are crucial for business growth through referrals and repeat business. Bain & Company notes that acquiring customers can be 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining them.

In this competitive market, maintaining customer satisfaction and engagement is challenging. Salesforce, the leading customer relationship management (CRM) software, can help.

It offers more than just contact storage; it enables personalized customer connections and streamlines sales, marketing, service, and commerce operations in one platform.

Salesforce is not just a single software but a versatile platform with various modules and applications customizable for each company's unique needs. Its "Customer 360" ecosystem encompasses many products, including marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development. This enables businesses to integrate different facets of their customer journey within a single unified platform.

But, how do you use Salesforce?

This post provides a detailed overview of using Salesforce for customer success, serving as an introduction to the broader CRM landscape. We've also compiled additional resources for further exploration.

7 ways to use Salesforce for customer success and retention

Ready to upgrade your Salesforce from a simple contact list to a customer retention hub? We'll guide you through 7 strategies to leverage Salesforce for customer success.

Integrate your customer data

Picture a company:

Marketing team: Utilizes HubSpot for email campaigns, lead generation, and landing pages.

Sales team: Relies on Salesforce to manage the sales pipeline, track opportunities, and close deals.

Customer service team: Uses Zendesk to handle support tickets, resolve issues, and maintain customer satisfaction post-sale.

Without integration, teams work in isolation, lacking key insights into each customer's journey. Salesforce's integration features link these separate data sources, creating a comprehensive view of customer information. Integrating HubSpot, Zendesk, and Salesforce forms a clear data funnel, offering a unified customer perspective. This approach eliminates silos, enhances teamwork, and strengthens your customer experience CX strategy.

Now:

Your marketing team can customize campaigns using past support interactions or purchase histories, ensuring relevant messaging and avoiding repetitive communication.
The sales team can spot upsell opportunities by analyzing customer issues mentioned in support tickets, boosting revenue, and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Your customer service team proactively addresses potential issues based on marketing campaign responses or sales conversations, reducing support tickets and fostering a seamless experience.

Take advantage of personalization and be proactive

Creating a unified customer profile with integrated data is the first step. Next, use this data to design personalized journeys that delight your customers, showcasing the power of data-driven personalization in Salesforce. Analyze purchase history and browsing patterns to send tailored recommendations or offers through email or app notifications.

Personalization extends to proactive support. Use data insights to transform potential issues into engagement opportunities. For instance, an airline can analyze frequent flyer data in Salesforce to identify customers nearing mile expiration and offer personalized upgrades or extended mile validity, enhancing loyalty and encouraging future travel.

Use Salesforce’s social media tools to reach your customers

Social media has evolved beyond simply broadcasting messages. It now focuses on engaging in dialogues, creating communities, and connecting with customers, a process Salesforce enhances significantly.

With Salesforce's social media tools, you can engage in online communities, join discussions, and provide personalized support to potential customers. Gartner research indicates a 15% increase in customer churn for companies not responding on social media. Salesforce Social Studio consolidates different social platforms into one hub, allowing for efficient interaction management, sentiment analysis, and targeted campaign execution.

Integrate Salesforce with your customer support platform

Customer support goes beyond problem-solving; it's about grasping customer needs. Salesforce provides tools like Service Cloud and Einstein Case Classifications to optimize support workflows, gauge customer sentiment, and foresee risks. Service Cloud gives your team a comprehensive platform to handle interactions via phone, email, social media, and connected devices, enabling immediate, informed responses. It also features a vast library of third-party applications you can use for everything from co-browsing to KPI tracking to ticket merging and more.

Integrating support and success tools in Salesforce creates a continuous cycle where customer challenges inform proactive solutions, leading to increased satisfaction, retention, and business growth.

Torn between Intercom vs Salesforce? Dive into this detailed comparison to discover the perfect CRM for your customer success journey.

Track customer interactions

Tracking website and app usage, along with customer service interactions in Salesforce, helps identify changes in user frequency. Spotting a once-frequent user becoming less active, you can proactively reach out with personalized assistance and options or offers to re-engage them.

In Salesforce, creating a report for customers with no interaction in the last 6 months is straightforward. Just set the "Date Range" field to the past 6 months, and you'll quickly get the report you need.

Identify and reengage inactive users

Inactive users have the potential to be reactivated into your customer base, and Salesforce provides the necessary tools for this. Consider an online music service like Spotify. Salesforce can analyze user listening habits to identify loyal users who've recently disengaged. A tailored email offering a free premium trial or personalized music suggestions can re-engage them.

Segment inactive users by the duration of inactivity, last interaction channel, or purchase history to send relevant reminders, exclusive offers, or engaging content to reignite their interest. Inactive users are not lost causes but opportunities for re-engagement. Remember, acquiring a new customer can be three to 10 times more expensive than reactivating an inactive one.

Use cobrowsing and session replays to get customers to their ‘aha’ moment

This brings us to our final point of ways you can use Salesforce for customer success – Fullview.

Fullview Integration

Imagine a potential customer struggling with your product demo, contacting support, but not getting clear help via text, leading to frustration and a jeopardized sale. Now, envision being able to virtually join them, see their issue, and provide real-time, hands-on guidance. This is possible with cobrowsing tools like Fullview, especially when integrated with Salesforce, turning challenges into delightful experiences.

For SaaS companies, customer onboarding is critical. With Fullview in Salesforce, sales or customer success reps can start a cobrowsing session right from the contact record or support ticket, without any downloads needed. By viewing the customer's screen live, they can spot and address any onboarding difficulties, explain complex features, and answer questions immediately. This tailored assistance eases frustration, builds trust, and enhances the chances of a smooth onboarding process.

Cobrowsing

Cobrowsing with one-click control elevates your customer support beyond mere problem-solving. It opens up opportunities for more interactive assistance. Support teams can use annotation tools to emphasize important elements, focus on particular areas, or visually guide users. Integrated video, audio, and text chat create a seamless communication channel, fostering rapport and ensuring users feel acknowledged and understood. Low-latency screen control ensures a smooth experience for everyone on the call and allows customer success, sales, or support reps to guide users on screen, click, navigate, etc., saving users a lot of hassle.

For more information about how Fullview integrates with Salesforce, visit our Salesforce Integration page.

Session replays

Fullview's cobrowsing offers immediate assistance, but for deeper insights, session replays, which are also included in the Fullview <> Salesforce integration, are invaluable. These replays record user sessions in your app, enabling your customer success team to analyze and understand user behavior.

Within Salesforce, session replays highlight areas where customers frequently disengage. Reviewing these interactions exposes difficult-to-navigate sections of your website. Fullview's automated detection of frustration indicators, such as rage clicks and encountered bugs, adds another layer of understanding.

Equipped with these insights, your company can redesign challenging areas to enhance usability and improve the overall customer experience.

Conclusion

The strategies discussed can turn Salesforce from a simple data store into a dynamic engine for customer success. It's important to remember that success lies not just in solving problems, but in understanding their root causes.

Overall, Salesforce can help businesses of all sizes improve their customer relationships, streamline operations, and gain a competitive edge.

If you're prepared to harness the transformative potential of cobrowsing and session replays, Fullview is ready for you. Visit Fullview to discover the untapped potential within your Salesforce and your customers today.

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Last checked: 23-Dec-2023

How To Use Salesforce For Customer Success & Retention