Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a very powerful and customizable product. It is easy to use. Built on the standard Salesforce platform, the product can be customized to do almost anything that a business might need. It helps organizations increase productivity of support staff by providing better response time and also better quality of case resolutions. Also it has features to manage and review performance of support staff based on company metrics. It is well integrated with other Salesforce products like Sales cloud and Experience cloud. Very small businesses may find the product pricey. Also Salesforce admin or consultant might be expensive for small businesses to onboard.

Service Cloud is an excellent solution for businesses that have many clients and touch points across many departments. It functions as a common platform for teams that operate in different capacities and have varying levels of technical aptitude to share their intelligence and interactions with clients.

This is great for cold calling and starting clients from scratch. A lot of entry is required to build a customer profile, but if you are diligent in entering this information, then it can be extremely useful, and you will thank yourself down the road for having an organized database with as many or few details stored. It is a little more challenging for existing customers who have a wealth of information on their files because the transfer of information can be quite tedious.

It is very useful in having all your things in one place, being able to filter through them, and managing your pipeline this way. Where we found some additional problems was syncing Salesforce bidirectionally with our internal tooling, because there was a lot for our engineering team to build and get involved with, which isn't necessarily ideal in our use case.

This is a great solution for any customer that requires a 360-degree view of all their customer interactions. This platform also allows teams and/or divisions to have unique requirements and workflows to support different lines of business. We also have the option of creating different customer experiences based upon their specific support solutions.

Salesforce Service Cloud is a great option for those who want to manage customer data. It definitely works well if you have a large amount of data to manage. It is also very nice if you are looking to integrate with other apps like sales apps, email apps, or marketing apps. I would recommend those on a budget or who do not have a large amount of data look else where since it can be expensive.

Salesforce Service Cloud is well suited for organizations that are looking for a robust ticketing system, detailed reporting and time tracking features. Easy to track time spent supporting customers and can use the reporting to bill the customers efficiently. The customizable templates make it easy to adopt Service Cloud if your company has many different support teams with different support flows.

[Salesforce Service Cloud is] great at capturing detailed customer information. The information layout is easy to navigate and you don't have to move through a lot of different screens or places within the software to get a thorough understanding of the customer. Where it is less appropriate- I don't know of a way to check if someone else is viewing or working on a customer case at the same time. There may be an issue where two people are working on a case simultaneously and not even know it.

Salesforce Service Cloud is excellent for managing your customer service and support cases. For example, we use it when we need to keep track of issues that are raised by our Suppliers so that we can reach out to our Buyers and resolve any discrepancies. These cases are then tied to each Account and Contact associated with the support transaction and it makes it very clear and easy to track who is doing what with the request. Salesforce Service Cloud also does an excellent job of helping us automate the mundane tasks needed to capture key information and ease the workload off of our agents by providing easy to use macros/quick texts and flows that automatically fill in the necessary fields on the back end. Our agents don't need to waste time or energy worrying about data entry and can instead focus on their core skills of helping out customers.

I would not recommend this for small companies looking to do support. Too many functions and highly customizable, but requires experts to get the full power out of it. But for medium to large businesses who want to also integrate CRM data with support, it is a great solution.

If you are a growing company that uses Salesforce as your source of truth, Service Cloud is a great option to keep Support cases available in one place and to report on the account level. It's also great for Support teams that are tiered, as you can create various tiers to ensure cases are assigned to to appropriate representative. For example, we have a rep who only handles enterprise accounts. These are automatically assigned to her upon case submission.

• Cases

Cases is the basis of Service Cloud, and once you get accustomed to the workflow and interface, it can be quite useful. You can search for knowledge articles, email responses, or use case comments. Out of the box, Service Cloud is terrible, and it will not do what you want. There is a large amount of configuration you will need to do, from setting up email templates, creating workflows to mimic what other platforms do out-of-the-box, and even then you will encounter issues that impede your ability to communicate effectively with your customer. Out-of-the-box email-2-case did not work because we had an Email Service class installed for something else, which rendered the default email-2-case completely useless. So we need to create a custom email handler for cases. This also meant some of the native functionality was no longer going to work. We would end up having to write a ton of customized code, Lightning components, workflows, etc.

• Knowledge

Knowledge is rather nice at first, until you start using it and discover the limitations imposed by Salesforce. Articles are limited to 131,000 characters, and that includes the HTML markup hidden to the viewer. This means your articles will end up having to be abbreviated or broken up into smaller pieces. We tried to host these articles externally, but there is no option to embed these inside the Article object. You can embed videos hosted on YouTube, Vimeo or DailyMotion, but that's the extent. Anything else will require a fully customized solution for displaying knowledge articles. It's a very basic knowledge solution. Salesforce offers a really strong knowledge base of their own, but it's almost certainly not running using Articles, because Articles is terrible.

• Community

Communities is where your customers can go to search knowledge articles, communicate with support, and even create records in your org. It is quite customizable, which is laudable and appreciated. The ability to update and manage the community is relatively easy and can be done without much code.

Unfortunately, the issue comes up with Cases. There are components for displaying Cases, but unbelievably, there is no place for discussion of the case with the service agent. This is almost ludicrous. There are Case Comment related lists, but these are handicapped by artificial constraints. Customers can't view the entire case comment, because it is only a related list, and there's no ability to change this without creating your own Lightning component, which means additional development costs.

Ultimately, the overall impression of Service Cloud is an extraordinarily half-baked product which is nowhere near enterprise-grade, despite carrying enterprise-level costs.

Great for RMAs and cases - bug updates not so much.

It is well suited if you have service support that is tackled by multiple personnel, and personnel that are distributed across multiple locations. This will help in administering of cases and loading of case volume across personnel.
Service Cloud is less suited if your organization has a low volume (a couple a day) of service support inquiries and if the requests are highly redundant or always resolved in a single interaction.

Service Cloud is well suited for all sizes of contact centers. The platform is extremely flexible and extensible to make the agent experience easy to use and intuitive. New features like the Case Feed allow agents to quickly work on a case and see relevant information in a single pane. I have worked with customers using Service Cloud for customer service, support, IT helpdesk, as well as HR helpdesk and I see it equally useful there. When evaluating solutions, be sure to ask whether Knowledge Management is included or if it needs to be licensed separately. Salesforce allows a read of all articles internally and requires licenses only for knowledge creators. When evaluating solutions, look at the user experience. It should be clean, configurable, flexible, and intuitive. It should also have robust workflow and approval processes to support business processes. Again, this is an area of strength for Salesforce.

With the professional edition of Salesforce Service Cloud - managing data quality entry is restricted to only using validation rules and mandating some fields. Workflows are not an option. If the Products and Pricebooks are used in Salesforce Opportunities it can be useful for managing the various products companies sell.