Streamlined Support: Retail Energy Leverages Salesforce Service Cloud

“This project stands out as one of our most successful projects, achieving business goals while staying within budget. Our business stakeholders often refer to this team as the “A Team…”

A national retail energy provider with six commercial brands had various customer engagement systems resulting in a fragmented customer experience.  The organization was unable to provide consistent customer experience with disconnects across data, technology, and lacked visibility into their customer records. In addition, they struggled with brand differentiation and consistency across their systems.  This issue was exacerbated as the client continued an aggressive growth strategy through both acquisition and organic growth.

The client was looking to grow and support the concept of a “Universal Agent” – a Customer Service Agent who would work across multiple retail brands from a single system and engage customers through a variety of digital channels (Chat, SMS, Email, Social). This Service Agent would handle various call center responsibilities across new enrollments, service transfers, billing and customer support.

The client’s existing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology lacked the flexibility to represent multiple brands and the client needed to update their Automated Call Distribution (ACD).  This allowed incoming customer calls to connect to Customer Service Agent by brand that were trained and dedicated in brand-specific call handling, protocols and promotions specific to that retailers pricing, geography and utility.  The current state of the client’s customer experience was very reactive, responding only to customer issues as they surfaced, instead of proactively anticipating customer needs ahead of time.  The challenge with critical customer processes, people and technology led to a recipe for digital CX disruption.

The client’s key business objectives included:

• Reducing Costs to Serve by streamlining contact center operations & lowering call and chat volumes by deflecting interactions to self-service customers by deflecting calls to digital channels.
• Improving Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) by enabling convenient, seamless, and intuitive interactions across all engagement channels.
• Enhancing Workforce Management (WFM) to optimize agent scheduling & contact center occupancy, seasonality, improve monitoring, utilization, and ensure Service Agent compliance.

To achieve these goals, the client needed a comprehensive set of solutions to unify their Service Agents, enhance Service Agent productivity, and support consistent customer experience across multiple brands & engagement channels. We viewed the Salesforce Service Cloud platform as the right contact center foundation, integrating with new NICE CXOne capabilities, to drive new workforce management functionality across the contact center.

The client partnered with MRE Consulting to implement a unified and scalable Salesforce Service Cloud solution to provide a multi-brand Contact Center environment. This multi-phased customer experience transformation started with Salesforce Service Cloud Integrated with the Agent for Salesforce managed package from the AppExchange and a Work Force Management (WFM) software selection to help prioritize key capabilities around scheduling, call handling, Service Agent effectiveness, and Contact Center operations.  The solution facilitated seamless call routing to the appropriate branches within the Contact Center, streamlining call handling through a unified, single-portal view.  Customer calls were also identified by brand and skill, providing Service Agents with awareness and valuable context to effectively handle calls and live chats.

Key features:

• Advanced Call Quality Management: Enhanced training, issue resolution, and quality assurance for Service Agents in the Client’s Contact Center, through implementation of CXOne Screen Agent.
• Email-to-Case Consolidation: Migrated Customer Care, Social Care and Residential Broker email inboxes from Help Scout to Salesforce Email-to-Case, streamlining email workflows and eliminating redundant systems to reduce licensing costs.
• Click-to-Dial Automation: Implemented Click-to-Dial automation through a series of screen flows to ensure Service Agents can select and verify customer details before calling a customer.  The complex technical logic behind this results in a tremendous business improvement for Call Center Agents.
• Enhanced Voicemail Management: Designed voicemail-to-case with embedded audio player on Salesforce Case records.  This allows Service Agents to listen to voicemails and respond in an organized fashion to the customer. Voicemails are tied to customer records and accounts within the system.
• Modernized Agent Interface: Implemented CXOne Agent Console Embedded within Salesforce, enabling Service Agents to manage both voice and digital interactions in a single unified workspace. This enhanced usability, streamlined workflows, and built with the Client’s “Universal Agent” philosophy.
• Live Agent Chat: Introduced a digital channel for real-time customer interactions, providing a convenient alternative to costly voice calls.  We enabled Customer Service Agents to handle multiple chats simultaneously. Digital Chat will be leveraged to deflect customers to the online Customer portal and other self-service options to further reduce costs to serve.
• Intelligent Call Routing: Smarter routing with brand-aware logic to reduce call transfers, improve first-call resolution, and improve deflection of routine inquiries to self-service options.