We all know that customers drive business growth. And these days, with customers who are more connected and informed than ever, delivering stellar customer service has become even more crucial to a company’s success — and more difficult.

It’s the ultimate challenge. Exceed customer expectations without stretching your support staff to the limit. The solution? A Salesforce Customer Community enables your customers to help themselves, and each other.

Discover self-service success

Today’s consumers are more social, and mobile, than ever before. And when they have questions, they want answers — fast. By integrating a self-service community into all of your customer support processes, you empower customers to find the answers, share their experiences with others, and even work together to solve problems.

Deliver smart support with fewer calls

Community Cloud’s highest-quality search allows customers to search both the knowledge base and previous community discussions, so they can quickly locate the best possible answer. And that means fewer calls, emails and tweets directed at your customer service department. In fact, according to a Salesforce Customer Relationship Survey, customer communities result in a 31% increase in call deflection, leaving your support agents more free time to tackle critical cases.

Create proactive partners in support

Your service agents aren’t the only ones who know about your products or solutions. Your customers use your products, and many are passionate consumers. You can leverage this group of “experts” within the community to answer even deep-dive questions. These brand evangelists help lend a human face to your brand, while promoting deeper customer loyalty.

Find proactive partners with customers

When customers have direct access to their peers through a community, they can share new and interesting ways to use products, or suggest ideas about improvements. Community Cloud allows companies to incentivize this community participation with gamification, like customized badges for the most active members.

Integrate community and service for a win-win

Community Cloud easily integrates with Service Cloud, allowing service agents to stay connected with the community to assist on a case when necessary, while delivering the actionable support metrics managers need to make key business decisions. Companies can even set up intelligent, skill-based routing to route the right cases to the right agent at the right time.

Transform customer relationships

When customers know you’re listening to their challenges, ideas, and feedback, they become more engaged, loyal consumers. And when they’re empowered to solve problems on their own without ever picking up the phone, it dramatically reduces service case resolution time, allowing agents to work smarter — and companies to drastically reduce costs.

The bottom line — Community Cloud with Service Cloud truly delivers on the promise that the best customer service experience is the one that never has to happen.

Want to learn more about how a customer community can drive your customer interactions? Download the free e-book: