Salesforce Service Cloud

It is well suited to collect the basic data we need and it maintains phone, email, chat info. They have confirmed they are HIPAA compliant with the data and that is very important. But, their customer service is seriously disjointed. It is understandable that an issue must be escalated to the next department but that should be done internally without expecting the customer to do so.

It is a good platform to resolve customer service needs. I find it comfortable for daily work to record all updates of the progress of my students and the calls or other contacts which I made with the students or which made by somebody else. It is updating in real time which makes easy to use it with other people from company without missing any task.

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 is generally a great product not only for communicating with clients but also for case handling between teams. It is quite tricky to define a scenario where it would not be useful, as the level of customisation available makes it suitable for most businesses. If you are a small company just starting out the software may provide too many unnecessary functionalities.

[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.

I would say [Salesforce Service Cloud] would only need to be used by big corporation where data is essential. Very small startups really do not need it.

Although some Salesforce competitors provide APIs and plug-ins, none of them allow you to customize your user experience and deploy new tools and interfaces with little to no coding. Salesforce [Service Cloud] allows you to take advantage of our most recent innovations without the hassle of installing new software or training new employees. The Salesforce Customer 360 Platform lets you expand your capabilities beyond what Salesforce rivals can deliver.

Salesforce Service Cloud is suitable for a call center or anyone in the business of being the central contact area. I recommend it for anyone working with multiple clients at once also. This can be a handy tool when dealing with many Salesforce objects at once and servicing the records. Works well for any support role. I would not recommend for sales.

It is perfect to capture service provided, especially for non-profit and community programs. Its data object structure works really well for customers who have a complex situation and have made multiple contacts and need multiple resources. Salesforce service cloud can capture all these complex situations in a streamlined snapshot and it provides agents a centralized place to review all the data. It is definitely not for sales capturing.

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.

How do you organize your customer issues? How do you keep track of service metrics?

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.

If 0 was an option, it would be selected. The exponential cost to get Salesforce instance, in ANY capacity or product, to function as you as a customer were showcased, expected or desired is always hidden from you until after you sign a contract. 3rd Party partners are your reliance for all work and are not accountable for the work they do or DON'T do, contract or otherwise. SF does not hold its contracted partners accountable for their failings.

Obviously it depends on the colleague and their business needs but for a customer-facing business, Salesforce Service Cloud is extremely helpful and consolidates plenty of lengthy customer service functions.

Salesforce Service Cloud is well suited within our Customer Experience department and Supply departments. Customer Experience utilizies Service Cloud for tracking customer contacts and follow ups. Supply uses Service Cloud to manage client accounts. Customer Experience and Supply work together that much better because they can communicate through the prime visibility of Service Cloud.

I would argue Salesforce is the best CRM option for most companies. However, I'm not sure it's always worth it. I believe you really need a managed partner available, or at least one full-time staff member that knows what they are doing. You can get it working on a shoestring, but not easily, and perhaps not as effectively. Coming from Zendesk, which mostly "just worked" and was about 30% of the cost, it can be a really good option.

We purchased Salesforce to get our data in better shape and have sales, marketing and service in one system, and our data is in far better shape than we ever saw with Zendesk or HubSpot.

It's hard to beat the level of customization available with Salesforce. If I want to do something, you can do it if you have the time or want to pay for something on the App Exchange. I think the larger the organization, the more likely I recommend Salesforce. The smaller, I might recommend HubSpot or Zendesk (which I've used in the past).

Our clients have visibility to the production phase and are able to chime in when needed to make corrections.

Overall very happy with Salesforce. Having a database that stores all the information it does allows me to focus on the task that I get paid to do.

The only place I can think of it as being well suited is if you have a trunk full of cash ready to spend on customizations. Otherwise, it is a waste of your time and money.

I think Salesforce Service Cloud is best suited for sales teams, account management, customer service, or some type of call center.

It's well suited if the client is already using other Salesforce products as it will help them get a better, well-rounded profile of their customer. It may not always work if that is the only Salesforce offering the client is using.

I would recommend others use Salesforce Service Cloud based on my experiences working with a variety of companies within different industries to find success. If your goals are to improve customer relationships, which is likely for most organizations, then implementing the software shouldn't be second-guessed. Salesforce Service Cloud is an innovative product that just keeps evolving—you can trust it to evolve with your own needs as you grow.

This product is great due to its integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, analytics capabilities, integration chat bot capabilities, leveraging AI, ML and NLP capabilities, and reporting capabilities. Integration can become complex as it is code driven instead of driven by components.