Salesforce Experience Cloud Formerly Salesforce Community Cloud vs Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Experience Cloud is well-suited for organizations that have clients who periodically or routinely need to access historical data or documents. The product also offers an exceptionally effective tool to engage with customers around support/service issues and the entire Case management functionality built into the Salesforce platform. The product might be less well-suited in environments where there is exceptionally high staff turnover within customer accounts, or where there is a substantial lack of very basic computer skills.

Salesforce Service Cloud is excellent as a CRM, a case management system, multi-channel contact centre support application, service and ticketing application as well as helping automate back office processes. If you want to extend Service Cloud into Sales, Self-Service or Digital Marketing, you need to purchase additional services which can be relatively high cost.

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

• Flexibility of data tracked, displayed, reported on, and customized.
• Single source of truth for support, implementations, sales and management.
• Ability to integrate through built-in app exchange and easy API.
• Reporting and emailed reports with direct links to drill down into data.
• Do virtually whatever you "need" to do.

• The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
• Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)

• Incredibly complex to set up and configure.
• Multiple points of potential failure.
• Things Desk.com did out-of-the-box require customized code and components in Service Cloud.
• Front-facing community is extremely difficult to configure and comes with many limitations.
• No help is provided by Salesforce without expensive Premiere Support plans.
• Expensive! Hidden costs and development costs are going to make Service Cloud far more expensive than almost any other Help Desk provider out there.

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Salesforce has a more than 99% uptime rate and Salesforce Service Cloud is no exception. I have never had any issues experiencing outages or service degradation when it comes to using the Service Cloud product (that I can remember). Always reliable and easy to use, I would recommend this product as your go-to for helpdesk, service desk, incident management, call center, and other business process needs.

It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.

There are issues with page load performance and database performance for sure, but we are a very complex setup with a lot of automation and processing for 2000+ users so this is not surprising. We are also global, so the issue with distance from the regional servers is a problem.

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

It depends on what support package you buy from Salesforce. That can be good or bad. It's highly flexible to your needs pricing wise. If you have devs on staff then don't buy support. If you don't, then sfdc offers support for a cost.

I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, financial aid, and registration. We also had to do our work and then log out before asking a questions of another department. Sometimes simultaneous use was necessary. However, this was years ago and they may have since updated the program.

I have used Microsoft Dynamics in the past and I feel that Salesforce compares positively to it. While both software offers cloud based service and a mobile app, Microsoft Dynamics doesn't support integration with Gmail. One of the reasons we like Salesforce so much is that it can integrate with your email.

• Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
• Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
• Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data

• While I don’t have a dollar value because I’m not the manager of the support team, I have heard many accounts of how the use of Service Cloud has made us much more efficient at delivering customer support
• Using Service Cloud has had a big impact on removing silos between departments because it’s much easier now for non-support users to interact with cases
• We now have a lot of automation of other features that we didn’t have before Service Cloud, for example, integration with our customer survey tool