Service Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.
$25
per month
ServiceNow IT Service Management
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
ServiceNow is a fast-growing service management provider that went public in 2012. Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and configuration management, and (on the higher tier ITSM Professional plan) ITAM and software asset management.
They have a variety of features available like case management, CRM etc. Salesforce itself is a leading CRM software, so it's the best option available in the market right now. They also have a great customer support base.
Service Cloud is linked to our internal Salesforce CRM tool which is a huge advantage. It allows everything in one place and also allows us to integrate with other tools such as Kimble.
Salesforce Service cloud integrates with its own world-class CRM which enables our agents to work more effectively and efficiently. We already had Salesforce Sales Cloud so it was a really easy transition. It was easy to set up and all our information was already there. The …
Service Cloud was a good choice for us vs. the other tools primarily for the seamless integration with all the other functionality in SFDC and the easy customization it allows. While ServiceNow has similar capability, we had to build an integration to SFDC during the time we …
Sr. Principal Solution Architect / Delivery Manager
Chose ServiceNow IT Service Management
ServiceNow is much better than Salesforce Service Cloud and it has more functionality and better ways to manage incidents and problems as compared to the competition. Oracle Service Cloud comes close but I will recommend ServiceNow unless you are an Oracle shop. If you lots of …
Salesforce Service Cloud is a digital customer service platform in the help desk software category on TrustRadius. It allows users to respond to internal and external service requests across a variety of digital channels and provides automated and self-service help for customers.
In contrast, ServiceNow is an IT management service (ITSM) tool that allows organizations to centralize and align the delivery of information technology services and processes. This helps provide a better end-user experience. It can also be used as a technical support/ticketing system for internal or external purposes.
Features
These platforms can both be used as support platforms. However, Salesforce Service Cloud is primarily used as a customer service platform while ServiceNow focuses more on supporting organizations’ internal technical needs—including providing technical support.
Salesforce Service Cloud provides users with a comprehensive view of customer communications and serves as a single source of truth for tracking customer interaction histories for the entire organization. It also provides access to self-service portals to articles, knowledge-bases, account information, and the organization’s customer community. Using the Service Cloud, users can provide one-on-one or automated support across digital channels like chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, etc.
ServiceNow provides organizations with features related to IT service support, application building and deployments, and workflow streamlining. These capabilities include the ability to automate business processes, a no-code mobile application builder, workflow applications builder, intelligent chatbots, Machine Learning-driven task automation, a configuration management database, and performance analytics.
Limitations
Both platforms have a wealth of features and support a variety of use cases, but each has a few limitations to be aware of.
Users on TrustRadius comment that Salesforce Service Cloud has so many features that learning how to use the platform can be overwhelming, especially for new users. Many have said that customization is needed to take full advantage of the system and that Salesforce Service Cloud has limited out-of-the-box functionality. Prices for certain add-ons can also be expensive.
ServiceNow customers on TrustRadius note that user-interface can be clunky and hard to navigate. Some users also feel that report building can be difficult. The software also requires a significant amount of engineering resources in order to customize it exactly to your business needs.
Pricing
Salesforce Service Cloud offers four different pricing tiers. The higher-priced plans provide access to more advanced features such as service contracts and entitlements, web services APIs, and access to 24/7 support. All plans are all billed annually, on a per user per month basis. The initial price points for each plan are as follows:
The Essentials plan is $25 per user per month
The Professional plan is $74 per user per month
The Enterprise $150 per user per month
The Unlimited $300 per user per month
ServiceNow does not disclose pricing information on its website but will provide a customized quote upon request.
Features
Salesforce Service Cloud
ServiceNow IT Service Management
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
78 Ratings
12% above category average
ServiceNow IT Service Management
8.2
67 Ratings
0% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets
9.176 Ratings
8.766 Ratings
Expert directory
8.554 Ratings
7.650 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
8.964 Ratings
7.662 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation
8.361 Ratings
8.359 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
9.376 Ratings
00 Ratings
Ticket response
8.975 Ratings
00 Ratings
Service restoration
00 Ratings
7.555 Ratings
Self-service tools
00 Ratings
9.064 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards
00 Ratings
8.861 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.9
73 Ratings
16% above category average
ServiceNow IT Service Management
-
Ratings
External knowledge base
8.864 Ratings
00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
8.971 Ratings
00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.8
78 Ratings
16% above category average
ServiceNow IT Service Management
-
Ratings
Customer portal
8.555 Ratings
00 Ratings
IVR
8.635 Ratings
00 Ratings
Social integration
8.748 Ratings
00 Ratings
Email support
9.277 Ratings
00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration
9.067 Ratings
00 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Service Cloud
-
Ratings
ServiceNow IT Service Management
8.5
60 Ratings
3% above category average
Configuration mangement
00 Ratings
8.259 Ratings
Asset management dashboard
00 Ratings
8.658 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement
00 Ratings
8.752 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with
In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.
When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.
It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!
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.
To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.
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.
The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.
Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.
The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.
Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.
I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.
Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.
Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.
