Salesforce Service Cloud: half-baked, expensive, limited, and frustrating
August 26, 2020

Salesforce Service Cloud: half-baked, expensive, limited, and frustrating

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Service Cloud

We chose to use Service Cloud after Desk.com was purchased by Salesforce and subsequently shuttered. Part of the Desk.com cessation was a push to move customers to Service Cloud. After much internal discussion, we decided it would be nice to have our entire help system within our main business portal.

It was our intention to offer customers a place to look up information and submit cases, possibly even communicate with each other in a forum.
  • Cases are highly customizable.
  • Workflows and custom fields can help categorize and target workload.
  • Integration with CRM keeps all information in one portal.
  • 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.
  • Customers have been a bit frustrated by our lack of responsiveness.
  • Knowledge base is terrible due to character limitations of the Article object.
  • Customer loss due to our inability to provide proper service and support.
Desk.com was our previous foray into customer support, and it was functional and worked quite well. It was not exactly the most intuitive to update, but it got the job done and was reliable.

Freshdesk was our primary next decision, and we would have gone with them except we were attempting to keep our business records combined with the service records.
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.

Do you think Salesforce Service Cloud delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Salesforce Service Cloud's feature set?

No

Did Salesforce Service Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Salesforce Service Cloud go as expected?

No

Would you buy Salesforce Service Cloud again?

No

There are several components to Service Cloud which I will address: Cases, Knowledge, and Community. Each of these has various pros and cons, although the cons far outweigh the pros. It's become an albatross around our company's neck, and I'm requesting our company decision makers to move to a different platform ASAP.
  • 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.

Salesforce Service Cloud Feature Ratings

Organize and prioritize service tickets
7
Expert directory
3
Subscription-based notifications
5
ITSM collaboration and documentation
8
Ticket creation and submission
9
Ticket response
2
External knowledge base
2
Internal knowledge base
5
Customer portal
3
IVR
Not Rated
Social integration
Not Rated
Email support
4
Help Desk CRM integration
8