Item: Salesforce Service Cloud
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Salesforce Service Cloud to manage customer support cases, implementation projects, and manage several customer communities for different brands. We need tools to manage replies with customers, SLAs, and an integrated knowledge base for solving cases. Our goal is to reduce case volume, so built-in case deflection, e.g., article suggestions, is important.

Pros and Cons

The knowledge base is integrated into the case solving workflow
Queues can be maintained for different product areas and cases can be routed efficiently
Good reporting features to see where our problem areas are

Knowledge base is very poorly implemented — authoring, reporting, categorizing are time-consuming and clunky
Permissions are confusing — we are frequently asking our admins to adjust user permissions so they can see what they need
We have had to custom build several things that should be out of the box, e.g., rich text fields for case input (!), milestones (SLAs), case followers

Return on Investment

Approximately 30% case reduction
Far fewer cases reach out tier 1 support with the self-service knowledge

Reliability and Availability

Sometimes Salesforce Service Cloud is slow but I've never had an issue accessing it. Planned outages are always at times when I'm not working.

Customer Experience

The integrated CRM with cases and communities is a huge selling point, one that makes up for a lot of the missing features we enjoyed on other platforms. The fact that the KB is integrated, for instance, is great for quick customer and agent access, but the KB itself has so many missing features that it's been difficult to work with at scale.

Key Insights

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

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

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

Yes

Did implementation of Salesforce Service Cloud go as expected?

Would you buy Salesforce Service Cloud again?

Other Software Used

ClickUp, Slack, Evernote

Likelihood to Recommend

Salesforce Service Cloud is good as an integrated CRM and that goes a long way. Implementing specific tools such as the integrated knowledge base, milestones, case followers, and more has been clunky and far behind other solutions we've used. The integration really goes a long way in supporting my "7" rating. If I took that away, I'd give it more like a 4 or 5 for its clunkiness and missing features.

Salesforce Service Cloud's integrated data makes up for clunkiness and lackluster features

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Service Cloud