by Surekha Shetty | Aug 7, 2023 | General, Software, Time Tracking
Salesforce Cases are extremely important to your customers because they help them get their issues with your product or services resolved. Today, customers demand personalised service through their journey with their vendors. And often, it is customer service and case management that sets a company apart from its competitors. So it is critical for businesses to handle cases seamlessly to build an excellent customer service reputation.
Using Salesforce Case Tracking is a great way for you to manage your customer issues and provide them with great service. Case Management helps you leverage your support services and improve your customers’ experience as they engage with your business. Salesforce case time tracking is a key metric that your business can use to ensure higher customer satisfaction and more efficient operations.
If you are a technology company, then handling customer service Cases may be more complex than in other industries. In addition to multiple levels of Customer Support agents spending time on a specific customer case, you may also require your Professional Services Team or an Installation team to check on specific changes that they may have made during the installation process. You may need your software development team to spend time on the Case. And neither your Professional Services team nor your development team may be using Salesforce. As a Customer Services Manager, how do you get a complete and accurate view of the total time spent on a Case?
With the TimeTracker for Salesforce, we give you simple ways for your teams to track time directly to Salesforce Cases. If your software development team uses Atlassian’s Jira for issue tracking and management, then we have a simple way to integrate Salesforce Cases and Jira issues. We give your PSA team a simple web-based application to track any time spent directly to Cases. And for your Customer Service agents working inside Salesforce, we have Automatic Timers that work both on Cases and on the Lightning Case Console. So let’s look at how each of these work.
1. Tracking Support Agent Time
Your Support Agents are busy people with calls, chats emails coming in all the time. So you want an easy way for their time to be tracked. With our easy to add Automatic Time Tracking Lightning components, your support agents don’t even have to think about Starting / Stopping timers. With the Automatic Timer configured on your Case View page, every second of the time that an agent spends on a Case record is automatically tracked. Nothing to click, nothing to update. Your Support Agents continue to work within the Salesforce Case as they would normally. All of their time is automatically tracked to the Case. And the Lightning components work, whether your agents open individual Cases or use the Salesforce Case Console. Our Automatic Timer works across multiple tabs, allowing your Support Agents to work on multiple Cases at the same time. You can easily configure whether the time for each Case should be tracked simultaneously or not.
2. Tracking PSA / Installation Team Time
If your PSA or Installation teams need to get involved on the Case, then our simple web application allows them to track the time that they spend on a specific Case. The time that they record on the TimeTracker Web app is automatically passed through to Salesforce and logged against the Case. So now you have the additional time spent by your PSA / Installation time in Salesforce too and logged right to the Case that they worked on. Your users can track their time as they work on the Case as in the attached screenshot here. They can also track the time that they spent on multiple Cases on a simple multi-line screen.
3. Tracking Development Team Time
And now to your development team. If they are already tracking their work times within Jira Worklogs, then the TimeTracker for Salesforce has a simple webhook that automatically pulls those Worklogs into Salesforce. By integrating Salesforce Cases and Jira Issues, you can create a seamless workflow for issue resolution. When a customer support representative identifies a bug or a technical issue reported by a customer in Salesforce Cases, they can create a corresponding Jira Issue directly from the case. This integration enables a smooth handoff between support and development teams, ensuring that issues are tracked, prioritized, and resolved efficiently. Since the Salesforce Cases are now directly created as Jira issues, the time spent on those Jira issues can now be pulled back into the Salesforce Case. Our webhook can be scheduled to pull Worklogs from Jira at a frequency that you want.
Conclusion
Now with the time spent by your Support Agents, your PSA team and your development team all in one single repository in Salesforce, your reporting and analysis on Case handle times becomes a cinch.Whether you want to monitor the status of a specific customer Case or measure how quickly cases are being resolved, you can now do that with all the tools that Salesforce Reporting gives you. You can use
the Case data to identify trends in customer cases and prioritize the Cases based on urgency.
With our Case reporting, you can now figure out how long it takes for each stage of the process from Case Initiation to Resolution. You can also analyze time spent on different types of Cases. You can then use this data to pinpoint areas of improvement to reduce response times and improve customer satisfaction. So now you have everything within Salesforce to track Case times and resolutions so you can better understand your customers’ requirements and optimize your operations for maximum efficiency.
You can read how MercuryGate International the leading transportation management software provider was able to plug revenue leakages for paid Support Cases with the TimeTracker for Salesforce.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
by Surekha Shetty | Feb 16, 2022 | Project Management, Software, Time Tracking
Customer service productivity metrics are essential for any business that wishes to remain competitive. However, not just any productivity metrics will do because it’s essential to get feedback on what helps drive your business and keep your customers happy.
The need to use the right metrics leads to the question of which metrics you should use, so let’s take a closer look.
Staff Productivity
By staff productivity, we mean time spent by staff on productive tasks rather than time-consuming, menial tasks that offer little value. It’s not to suggest that employees are necessarily lazy, but some processes might take up much of your team’s time without you realizing how inefficient your processes are. A survey has shown that around 89% of people waste time every day at work, making it an issue that clearly needs addressing.
One way to help ensure your staff are working productively is to track how much time they spend on particular tasks. Sophisticated time tracker software like the PK4 Time Tracker makes it seamless for you to track how long your staff are working for, including a breakdown of which tasks they are working on. Armed with this information, you can refine and streamline your process to help ensure your staff get more done during their working day.
Time tracker software can also help reduce time spent on other tasks like updating systems with cases that were worked on during the day. Such features help to reduce the workload on staff, giving them more time to focus on more productive tasks.
Ticket Volume
Even the hardest working and most efficient staff are only human. If there are too many tickets to process, some customers will be left waiting too long for a resolution. Monitoring your ticket volume will help ensure your customer service teams can cope with their workloads. When monitoring ticket volume, you can get helpful information like which days of the week are busiest and whether you need more staff to help.
In addition to looking at ticket volume, you should also monitor ticket backlog. If the backlog is building then, it’s a clear sign that you need to take action, especially if there are tickets not being resolved at all due to staff being too busy.
First Response Time
Making customers wait too long for a response from customers services makes a bad impression. Make them wait for too long, and you may end up losing them altogether. The need to make a good impression makes it essential that your customer services department delivers a good response time.
Monitoring first response time will help give you a good overview of how effectively your case management is and whether you have enough staff to cope with the workload.
Average Resolution Time
Responding to queries is a good start, but how long it takes to solve resolutions is another critical metric. If issues take too long to resolve, customers are likely to become frustrated, which could easily mean they choose to do business with your competition instead. Calculating your average resolution time is easy. Simply divide the total time spent on resolving tickets by the total number of tickets processed, and you have your figure. Automatic case time tracking software will help make this easy for you.
You can improve average resolution times in several ways. For example, empowering your agents with an appropriate customer relationship management (CRM) platform will help ensure they have quick and easy access to all the details they need. Another potential solution is to check that your agents have sufficient training in resolving customers issues.
First Contact Resolution
The holy grail for customer service teams is to solve customers’ problems on the first contact. Customers may begin to get quite frustrated if they must call or message multiple times to have their problems solved. Like average response time, the first contact resolution metric will help you gauge how well trained and equipped your agents are for case management.
Customer Satisfaction Score
The customer satisfaction metric probably speaks for itself and is one of the most powerful customer service metrics there is. This metric involves asking customers how satisfied they were with your customer service department. It’s also an opportunity for you to discover what you could be doing to improve the experience for your customers.
In many cases, customers’ opinions can be gathered with help from automated messaging systems or similar. At others, it might be necessary to run customer surveys to gauge how satisfied or otherwise your customers are with your service.
Customer Churn Rate
No matter how much effort you put into solid customer services, some of your customers will still leave. The number of customers who stop doing business with you is known as churn rate, and the lower the churn rate, the better.
Churn rate is an important metric because it helps you look deeper into why your customers might be leaving. If a customer says they are happy with the service they received from your agents but still left, it suggests another underlying issue that you need to address.
Summary
If you don’t monitor how well your customer service department is doing, it can be easy for standards to slip, which could be very bad for business. Above is a selection of metrics that you can use to help ensure your business remains effective at case management, maintaining customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
It’s important to remember also that technology has transformed the way we communicate in recent years, and your customers will expect you to adapt accordingly. Not only that but using the right technology can help you keep your staff productive by monitoring which tasks they are working on. The right technology will also help ensure your customer service agents have the tools they need to do their jobs effectively.
by Surekha Shetty | Jan 18, 2022 | Project Management, Software, Time Tracking
Interview with Mr. Jason Liner, VP FP&A MercuryGate International, Cary NC
MercuryGate is the only full power, feature-rich transportation management system (TMS) that is singularly focused on strategic freight transportation management automation and has been for over two decades. The result is the best-of-breed transportation management platform that enables logistics experts to execute efficiencies previously unattainable and empowers relative newcomers to perform at expert levels they could not otherwise achieve.
The MercuryGate TMS simplifies and centralizes the management of freight transportation within a single software platform to save time and money for shippers, 3PLs, brokers and carriers around the world. The platform supports all modes of transport including ocean, air, rail, truckload, LTL, last mile, parcel and intermodal to give you visibility to every shipment, automate manual processes, and make smarter decisions based on delivery performance.
Mr. Jason Liner is the Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis at MercuryGate International.
1. What is your primary role in the company?
My primary role is in Financial Planning and Analysis. As a part of my role, I work across Finance, Operations, Product Development, and Product Strategy. I help drive strategic decisions throughout the business, isolating issues and articulating appropriate business solutions.
2. What was the main challenge that you wanted to solve?
Some of our customers pay separately for Customer Support. For those customers, support is not a part of their subscription fees. We also do a fair amount of implementation services for our customers. We have three different teams working on customer-facing issues. There are Tier-1 and Tier-2 Support teams, the implementation team, and sometimes the development team. All these teams primarily work in different siloed software systems – the Customer support team in Salesforce, the implementation team in OpenAir, and the dev team in Jira. Our billing to customers is done based on the Case Number in Salesforce on yet another system. Reconciling hours spent on customer Cases across these systems was a nightmare. Some of the time details would have missing Case numbers. In addition, since some of our teams needed to log their hours in duplicate, they would often forget to do that. We recognized that we were losing out on our support revenues with all these issues. We desperately needed a single system-of-record for the hours that the different teams worked on Customer Cases. One that we could easily integrate with our billing system.
3. What is your number 1 challenge to tracking employee performance?
Disparate and siloed systems for different teams
4. What is your team size?
About 120 people in Customer Service and Implementation teams. Plus, another 50 people in the development team who also work on customer-facing issues.
5. What are you currently doing to make your customer service team more efficient?
We have implemented the PK4 TimeTracker for all our teams in different ways. For the Customer Service team, which works in Salesforce, we have implemented the Time Tracker lightning component that tracks time right inside the Case. The process is highly efficient, and we are now tracking every minute that the team spends on a Case. For the development team, we have integrated their Jira worklogs to be brought into Salesforce directly via the TimeTracker. So their time is recorded automatically into the Time Tracker, without their having even to click a button. Our Implementation team uses the Time Tracker web app to track their hours whenever they need to work on a Case. So all hours worked are now directly tied to Cases, and it all happens seamlessly.
6. What has been the significant impact for you?
Within the first month of implementing the Time Tracker, we’ve seen our Support revenues go up because all the hours are now accurately tracked. The time that we spent reconciling and billing customers has also drastically reduced.
