Item: Salesforce Service Cloud
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Service Cloud

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

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Freshdesk and KnowledgeOwl

The major value proposition is that service cloud offers integrated services. That covers a multitude of lacking features. All of our agents preferred Freshdesk. Salesforce service cloud was lacking so many basic features compared to it that it was frustrating to switch. Simple things like an icon that would appear on a case when someone else was looking at it, preventing overwriting data. Salesforce doesn't have that. Or simple threading of comments on cases to easily see an interaction history. Salesforce doesn't have that out of the box!

Same with knowledge. It's clearly an afterthought in Salesforce and we all missed KnowledgeOwl, the platform we used for our knowledge base prior. Out of the box, you cannot even control the sort order of knowledge in the community view, and in the agent view, it's virtually impossible to browse knowledge. You have to create reports for everything, not something that's easy or straightforward to do.

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

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 Feature Ratings

Using Salesforce Service Cloud

Users and Roles

100 - Customer experience and professional services. We serve our customers in post-sales from implementing them, then throughout their support lifecycle as long as they remain customers.

Support Headcount Required

3 - They have to (of course) be well-versed in Salesforce itself and it really helps for them to have a deep background in using SF in a post-sales context. Just as important, though, is a collaborative and problem-solving approach. We have that in our SF admins — they are a part of all our teams so that when we are working on building SF features, they are our partners and collaborators, not simply making SF do what we ask. Most of the time, they improve on what we are asking them for and find unique solutions we wouldn't have thought of.

Business Processes Supported

Managing customer cases
Managing internal and customer-facing knowledge base
Providing robust reporting across all post-sales services

Innovative Uses

We are able to create complex reports without having to export to Excel.
We are able to use the knowledge approval process to build a robust content review strategy
We are able to support multiple brands

Future Planned Uses

Continuing to integrate our different brands' workflows
Integrating AI into our knowledge and case solving workflows

Likelihood to Renew

We are all-in with Salesforce as a company and aren't going anywhere anytime soon. A cynical way of looking at it is that we are stuck with it but that's pretty true. If I were venturing out, I would choose other best-in-class products that are far easier to implement and use and are less expensive.

Evaluating Salesforce Service Cloud and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We replaced Freshdesk for managing customer cases and we replaced KnowledgeOwl as our knowledge base. We replaced the with Salesforce because we wanted to integrate all of our work (including sales) into a single CRM. What we gained in having an integrated system we lost in many features we liked in our previous systems.

Key Differentiators

Cloud Solutions
Scalability
Integration with Other Systems

We needed a single integrated system that could support both sales and post-sales services. Individual features weren't weighed in the decision.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

It very well may be there Salesforce was the right move for our company given our strong growth but most of us in post-sales have been frustrated by the way Salesforce works. It does have good reporting features and a single integrated CRM but there are so many features lacking that I would personally go with other solutions and put a greater weight on feature sets.

Salesforce Service Cloud Implementation

Implementation Rating

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.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Third-party professional services

Coastal Cloud. They were great and we have maintained our relationship with them for Salesforce work. They had an uphill battle with SF and did a good job to get us the best result they could.

Implementation Phases

Yes - We first implemented basic case handling alongside of the customer community, since we needed to maintain continuity for our customers. We then implemented some project management tools for our professional services team and later built some knowledge workflows and refined case practices.

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a major issue with the implementation - Trim back expectations and get a really thorough understanding of the capabilities of the system vis-a-vis the legacy systems.

Implementation Issues

Lack of features compared to our legacy systems

Salesforce Service Cloud Training

Training Types Used

No Training
In-Person Training

In-Person Training

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.

Online Training

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.

Ease of Salesforce Service Cloud Training

The product was not easy to learn without training. I'd recommend training, either via your implementation partner or at least availing yourself of Trailheads, assuming you are using an out-of-the-box version of Salesforce. Training, especially for your support staff and daily users, is critical to being successful with Salesforce (or any enterprise product).

Configuring Salesforce Service Cloud

Product Configurability

This is a tough one to answer. When we are looking to modify something, the answer is often, "You can do anything as long as you have a lot of money and a developer with Apex knowledge." Out of the box configuration is generally pretty limited. Quick examples: only three levels of hierarchy in knowledge categories and only ten categories per level. Can't configure search. Often can't (easily) pull fields into reports.

Configuration Lessons

Find someone who really knows the ins and outs and has implemented service cloud before and have them help you. Do training on the out of the box features to determine whether they are useful for your organization, which will let you then plan out the customizations you'll need to make right away.

UI Customization

Some - we have done small customizations to the interface - The out of the box interface is pretty rough. We have done some simply customization in places but what's frustrating is how hard it is to do anything significant without significant development time. Example: out of the box cases don't support simple threaded comments, so it's very difficult to read a conversation at a glance. Lots of clicking into comment records. So we had to build a custom object just to house customer comments!

Extensibility and Customization

Some - we have added small pieces of custom code - We have created a number of flows to automate certain processes. It requires our admins to create them. They seem reasonably straightforward but require a lot of testing and it's easy for them not to work as expected. It's not possible for regular users to customize things in any way.

Additional Customization Considerations

It was pretty rough to move from products we liked quite well for handling customer cases and a knowledge base over to Salesforce, which was clearly built for sales and not service. Know that out of the box, SF likely doesn't have many of the features you used to have.

Salesforce Service Cloud Support

Support Rating

I have been unimpressed and largely frustrated with Salesforce support. The support cases I submit often require a lot of back and forth and the support staff often want to schedule a call to tell me things that they could just as easily communicate in writing on a case. I've never gained much insight from those calls. They generally just point me to documentation I already found lacking.

The couple of professional service engagements I've been part of have also been lacking in substance. Overall, I don't feel well supported from a technical side, though I have really liked our success managers who have advocated for us.

Salesforce Service Cloud Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Good followup Kept well informed	Less knowledgeable Problems left unsolved Escalation required Need to explain problems multiple times

Premium Support

We do have premium support but I'm not sure what it gets us.

Bug Resolution

Exceptional Examples of Salesforce Service Cloud Support

I've been very happy with our customer success team at Salesforce. They are responsive and helpful. But on the technical support side, I cannot point to any exceptional support.

Using Salesforce Service Cloud

Usability

It's fine. I have generally been able to figure out what I need to in the interface. But compared to more agile modern applications like ClickUp or Asana or Confluence or AirTable, it's sorely lacking in on-screen guidance and intuitiveness.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
None	Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Requires technical support Not well integrated Inconsistent Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn

Easy Tasks

Basic navigation is straightforward
The global search is okay (but not elegant or customizable)

Difficult Tasks

The global search is not customizable
Reporting is powerful but cumbersome
The knowledge base implementation is laughable

Salesforce Service Cloud Reliability

Scalability

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports.

Performance

The system is often a little laggy. Things load but often reports take a while to spin and dashboards take a while to refresh.

Integrating Salesforce Service Cloud

Ease of Integration

It's been a big pain integrating the knowledge base with other products.

Systems Integrated With

Pendo

It was pretty straightforward to integrate data points with Pendo.

Future Integration Plans

Litmos

Yes, they have a full integration.

Types of Integration

Single Signon
API (e.g. SOAP or REST)

Integration Lessons Learned

It can be straightforward, e.g., with Pendo, or it can be very difficult, e.g., integrating the knowledge base (via API) with other apps or creating SSO with your app. Work with a trusted partner who understands the ins and outs.