Salesforce digital engagement: a beginner’s guide
This isn’t an easy time to connect with customers. But tools like Salesforce Digital Engagement go a long way to reduce the pressure – and meet even the highest customer expectations.
In McKinsey’s 2022 state of customer care survey, 61% of respondents had experienced increased call volumes in recent years – almost as many expected this to grow further.
Salesforce Digital Engagement helps companies connect with customers across many channels – reducing call times, improving staff workloads, and providing excellent customer experiences.
This article gives you an overview of Salesforce Digital Engagement. We’ll start by explaining what Salesforce Digital Engagement is. Then, we’ll examine some of the key benefits of Salesforce Digital Engagement and the steps you need to take to get started. Finally, we will look at some alternatives to Salesforce Digital Engagement. (After all, this is not the only company to offer this service!).
If you’ve already got Salesforce, Digital Engagement will greatly improve your customer relationships. Let’s find out how.
What is Salesforce Digital Engagement?
Salesforce Digital Engagement is a suite of tools and capabilities offered by Salesforce. These tools help businesses to communicate with their customers through digital channels. Salesforce Digital Engagement allows employees to talk to staff through various digital media – including websites, mobile apps, social media, and messaging platforms.
These tools are for client-facing sales, marketing, and customer service work. With Salesforce Digital Engagement tools, customers can reduce the number of calls they need to make to the company. When companies maximize their use of Salesforce Digital Engagement, they can improve the customer experience and discover a good ROI on their digital investments.
Salesforce’s offerings are just one example of a sales engagement platform. We will introduce some alternatives at the end of the article. Increasingly, customer digital engagement is based on CRM packages. And as a Gartner report explained in 2021, this will almost certainly become the norm.
Why do you need Salesforce Digital Engagement?
A digital engagement platform could differentiate between satisfaction and disappointment for any business with complex customer interactions.
A customer digital enables enhanced customer experiences by providing seamless interactions across various digital channels. When combined with a CRM system like Salesforce, you gain a comprehensive view of each customer’s interactions and preferences. It empowers businesses to effectively engage with customers, build stronger relationships, and ultimately drive customer loyalty and business growth.
Let’s look closely at some of the key reasons for adding Salesforce Digital Engagement to your CRM capabilities.
1. Streamlining Customer Interactions
Salesforce digital engagement provides businesses with a unified view of customer interaction. By engaging customers through their preferred channels, companies can deliver consistent and personalized experiences that increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and drive revenue growth.
2. Boosting Efficiency and Productivity
With Salesforce Digital Engagement’s automation capabilities, businesses can identify each customer’s priority cases, assigning them to the right agents. This automation delivers improved customer experiences and increases agent productivity and satisfaction, prioritizing high-priority issues and reducing customer waiting times.
3. Driving Sales and Revenue
Businesses can improve customer engagement, increase conversions, and boost revenue by providing personalized and relevant content at every step of their journey. Companies can create targeted campaigns, measure channel conversion rates, and optimize accordingly to generate more qualified leads.
4. Ensuring a Secure and Compliant Customer Experience
Data regulations are a complex field today. With Salesforce’s digital engagement, businesses make sure that they operate secure and compliant customer experiences. Companies can manage governance policies and ensure that customer data is properly handled and readily available to meet customer inquiries or regulatory inspections.
5. Reimagining Customer Engagement
With Digital Engagement tools, organizations can create a customer engagement strategy that is flexible, agile, and scalable. The solution’s cutting-edge features aid in fostering deeper connections with customers by providing personalized experiences powered by AI, ML, and automation.
Getting Started with Salesforce Digital Engagement
Getting started with Salesforce Digital Engagement is similar to any process of IT procurement and Digital Adoption.
But let’s look at some of the specific steps you’ll need to take to ensure your Salesforce Digital Engagement adoption works well.
- Evaluate your specific communication needs. Identify the channels and functionalities you need to effectively engage with your customers. If you know that your customers only communicate with you via email, maybe the Salesforce digital engagement system is more than you need right now.
- Investigate your options. You might just find that other solutions are more appropriate to your situation. There are plenty of buying guides for digital engagement software.
- Obtain a subscription. Digital Engagement does not come as a standard feature of Salesforce deployments. As of May 2023, Salesforce reports the cost as $75 per user per month. That could be a small price to pay for the gains you could make with it.
- Get up to speed with training and adoption. You can’t just get the subscription and hope for the best. So, train your staff on using Salesforce Digital Engagement features effectively. Provide resources, documentation, and ongoing support to ensure the smooth adoption of the platform across your organization. Digital adoption platforms can help ensure all staff knows how to use the new tools.
- Configure Omni-Channel Routing. Implement omnichannel routing to ensure customer inquiries are directed to the most appropriate agents or teams based on skills, availability, and customer context. Define routing rules and queues, and prioritize channels based on your business requirements.
Alternatives to Salesforce Digital Engagement
The Salesforce Digital Engagement tools are perfect if your company is already using Salesforce. But these tools are not unique to Salesforce. Many other CRM packages include similar offerings.
Here’s a quick introduction to some of the main alternatives you might see around:
- Zendesk offers a comprehensive customer support platform with features like ticketing, live chat, social media engagement, and self-service portals. It provides tools for managing customer inquiries and interactions across multiple channels.
- HubSpot’s Service Hub provides customer service tools, including ticketing, live chat, knowledge base, and customer feedback management. It integrates with other HubSpot CRM and marketing tools for a seamless customer experience.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a comprehensive CRM solution with customer service capabilities. It offers case management, a knowledge base, live chat, and omnichannel engagement for efficient customer support.
- Oracle Service Cloud provides various customer service tools, including ticketing, a knowledge base, live chat, and social media engagement. It focuses on delivering personalized and consistent customer experiences across channels.
- Freshworks CRM offers a unified sales, marketing, and customer support platform. It includes customer support features such as ticketing, live chat, knowledge base, and automation capabilities.
Salesforce Digital Engagement: A No Brainer
One of the classic digital adoption myths says that the process is about technology, not people. Salesforce Digital Engagement shows that this couldn’t be more wrong. As a 2019 Deloitte report explained, “We believe that organizations must make customers central to digital transformation.”
Salesforce digital engagement is just one of the ways that you can use technology to put customers front and center in your digital transformation. It brings major benefits – such as streamlined customer interactions, digital engagement fit for the 2020s, and an overall boost to your ROI.
Getting started with salesforce digital engagement is similar to other digital adoption projects, but you must be alert to the specific issues in CRM.
Digital engagement can be a great way to improve your customer-facing departments. If you’re worried about the future, this may be a great change.
