What is Salesforce Service Cloud?

A comprehensive platform that enables organisations to work with customers – and channel partners – to provide excellent service efficiently.

A 5% increase in customer retention can increase profit by 25%+. Sometimes at high as by 95%.
Why Salesforce Service Cloud should be implemented by experienced consultants:
Get the right tool, set up right for you.

In this Salesforce Service Cloud Overview, we’ll:

• Start with a snapshot of the actual service performance benefits realised by clients.
• Briefly discuss the 12 key components of Service Cloud.
• Share Salesforce Service Cloud’s latest features.

This comprehensive Salesforce Service Cloud Overview demonstrates how we at CloudAnalysts can configure this software for your organisation.

So you and your teams can work with customers & channel partners to provide excellent service efficiently.

The results that companies actually achieve thanks to new implementations are persuasive. 

Salesforce collected success stories, and tallied up the results*. They are impressive:

For End-customers/consumers

• 35% increase in customer satisfaction.

For Companies

• 22% decrease in support cost.
• 26% increase in customer retention.
• 28% increase in agent productivity.
• 31% faster case resolution.

The Salesforce Service Cloud platform has 12 components that can be configured to your business needs.

Not every business needs every component. Companies can develop a roll-out plan, starting with a minimal viable product (MVP). This is then built out into a more sophisticated and comprehensive service solution over time.

1. Case Management

The core of Service Cloud.

We’ll configure it for you to automatically create cases from web or email. We will help you send auto-responses. And ensure you route work to the right queue or agent for faster, more accurate case resolution. As such, you can manage your whole case ‘lifecycle’ from one single system.

2. Service Contracts & Entitlements

You may have customer service contractually agreed with your clients with promised response time levels.

If so, this capability is importance. We will configure various service entitlements.

This then enables your service team to respond to each customer within their agreed time frame, with ease.

3. The Service Cloud Console

Console is Salesforce’s fancy name for the Service agent dashboard. It offers agents a single customer view. This means that an agent can handle cases faster, track customer history, view dashboards, a.o. All this, without having to switch tabs or software.

4. Service Cloud Reports & Dashboard

This dashboard is for management. We’ll configure it for you so that it displays all the reports and metrics you want and need. In the words of a client: with our solution, they now can proactively manage the service delivery, in real time. First time resolution is becoming really achievable for a larger number of cases.

Imagine you have an online library of all your service & support information. It allows agents to quickly find, and cut/paste answers to customer issues. You can make all or part of your internal library information available to customers. They will love being able to self-serve and solve their problem immediately. And for you, it means no cost of agent time.  

According to CSI, organisations that adopted Knowledge-centric Support (e.g. with Salesforce Knowledge):

• get up to 60% improvements in resolution time.
• They also get 50% increases in first-contact resolution,
• and 40% improvements in agent satisfaction. (And you know that happy agents generally make for happier customers.)
• Plus, they 50% increases in case deflection. (These amazing results make a business case for service cloud adoption easy.)

Read/write features for knowledge are included in the base package, which is extendable for an extra fee. There is HUGE value in the free version. Companies typically don’t have a streamlined, centralised knowledge base for customers yet. The free version of Salesforce Knowledge allows us to work with you for a period of time. We’ll coach you as organise your assets and build the initial knowledge base.

Months later, when the base is implemented, can you opt to make an additional investment on a more advanced Knowledge solution, whereby you set article writing approval processes, etc. Or decide your investment funds are best spent elsewhere.

This is a feature that allows you to route service work intelligently. You can balance work loads between agents. Or, push work to the most appropriate ones who have the skills and certifications required to solve the service problem.

Here is the key: it can deliver service across many channels. Think social media, phone, email, chat, your website, or even service from third parties. Salesforce omni-channel routing enables a seamless omni-channel organisation.

This helps you deliver the same customer experience across all your channels. And it allows you to communicate with clients in the channel of their choice.

Salesforce has built this solution out with a feature called the Omni-channel Supervisor. This set of workload management reports allows service managers a real-time view of what his happening across his service teams.

7. Telephony Integration (CTI) & Service cloud Voice

Salesforce has long been offering CTI integration. We can configure Service Cloud to integrate with all of the most popular telephony systems.

Recently, Salesforce added Service Cloud Voice, and intuitive soft phone to its service channels.

8. Intra-company collaboration & other platform features

Things like Chatter, the Mobile App and shared Files. Salesforce can also be configure to integrate with either Outlook or Gmail and other Google apps. These are actually general Salesforce features which we’ll build into your solution to meet your needs.

9. Web services API

Salesforce might not be the only platform you’re using. That’s why it features Web services API. You can connect external systems and data to Salesforce using web service APIs, including REST, SOAP, ao.

10. Agent Productivity tools

Besides the ones mentioned above, these would include: Case Auto-Assignment,Web and Email Case Capture, Case Email Auto-Response, Case Escalation Rules and Queues, Lead-Contact Account Management, Case Milestone Tracker, Orders Management and Advanced Case Management.

11. Next Best Action.

Basic AI is included: Deliver AI-powered contextual recommendations at the moment of maximum impact. There are 5,000 requests included monthly. More available for an extra cost.

12. Complaint Management

CloudAnalysts can configure your Salesforce service cloud to also handle formal complaints. This will enable you to make customers happier by managing complaints timely. It keep complaint handlers happy as they can do so with easy. And you’ll stay legally compliant as you respond within the legal time scales and in the formats required.

Service Cloud Chat for Web, or Web Chat for short, (and previously known as LiveAgent) offers real-time chat functionality. This tool allows a customer to communicate directly with a service agent via your website. Everyone loves this and it is a most-used support channel. It ranks as having the highest Customer Satisfaction of any Salesforce channel.

Web Chat allows agents to hold multiple conversations at once. This add-on product as some great features. For example, an agent can bring up the chatter’s customer profile (if already in Salesforce). There are prepared short answers he can choose to apply. Good for efficiency and consistency of service. Web Chat can be configured so that an agent can see what a chatter is typing. This allows him to be proactive when taking the case. Etc. This is a paid add-on.

Einstein for Service Cloud

To deliver smarter service with AI and analytics, use Einstein for Service either:

• – analytical: to get insights to complex strategic service questions.
• – predictively: to indicate best actions for superior results.

5 parts:

1. Einstein Bots (well-known),
2. Einstein Conversation Mining,
3. Einstein Case Classification (faster chat completion: predicts final field values based on closed cases and chat transcripts),
4. Einstein Article Recommendations,
5. Einstein Reply Recommendations (based on your org’s closed chat transcripts).

Get more visual displays, centralised KPIs like CSAT scores and service delivery metrics. And allow managers to take instant action to optimise.

Einstein Bots

The better you get with fitting out your bot, the better your results will be. Today’s customers expect a chat on a website, don’t they? They love the real time nature of it. The bot will take out the ‘data collection’ – time out of the customer interaction for your service rep, allowing them to talk to a lot more people with the same level of effort!

Check with your package to see if there’s any bot included with your Salesforce edition. It might be! Otherwise, for an Einstein bot, you need a Service Cloud and a Chat or Messaging license. Einstein for Service carries an additional cost.

When will you need to buy these? You may not think you need AI when you first begin. But remember that it takes months worth of data for any AI to become more reliable. So you start collecting that data sooner rather than later.

Experience Cloud create a whole extra engagement layer on top of your Salesforce platform. More than a regular web portal, a customer community is place for agents, customers and channel partners to find the answers they need quickly, anytime, from any device.

A community gives your company’s customers access knowledge articles and appropriate aspects of your Salesforce records that belong to their account. A Salesforce customer community is endlessly customisable.

It enables customers to complete basic self-service tasks. E.g. they can report & reorder a lost loyalty card. Communities are inherently social, building collaboration and  faster problem solving.

Surveys results show that companies who built a self-serve community see a 31% increase in case deflection. Customers like to be able to self-serve, so this could be an answer.

Beyond the customer community portal, Salesforce has two other type of portals, all which can be configured to support, among others, your customer service.

To get started with a portal is not as daunting as one might think thanks to the build-in portal templates. These allow you to build basic functionality with a good-looking interface relatively fast.

Learn more here:

Talk to us about portals, or get a demo:

Salesforce Service Cloud Voice 

Take telephony integration with Voice, which lets us natively integrate voice calling into your Customer 360 solution.

While there is an extra charge for this, it also boost agents productivity and customer service quality.

Field Service

This is Salesforce Service Cloud for your field service team.  It allows them to give faster, smarter, more personalised service via smart phones with Salesforce. Field workers can access account info from their smart phone to solve customer problems, and/or quickly create a work order for a case.  It allows service departments to schedule and dispatch work intelligently; manage complex assets; and monitor field staff real- time. It has advanced optimisation & scheduling features for multi-day and complex field work; as well as multi-signature service reporting. This is a paid add-on.

This wide array of service features means that Salesforce Service Cloud can be used for a range of business applications. Not just ‘repairs & replacements’…

For example:

Specialist medical staff and equipment scheduling & dispatch; constituency responses and immigration query handling for embassies; or scheduling and delivery of employee training modules.

We link your customer service to your marketing, sales and onboarding. This offers internal staff a single platform to perfectly respond. Thanks to service cloud’s single customer view.

Seen from a customer’s perspective: your company’s the left hand knows what the right one does. As a result, your customer gets a seamlessly unified, positive and consistent brand experience.

Use Salesforce to create a cultural-shift; make the entire organisation customer-centric. This means: working in unison, and doing away with departmental silos.

While the benefits and the customer benefits realise in figures and numbers are already impressive, Salesforce also constantly upgrades its service cloud platform. What sets Salesforce apart that it upgrades its software 3x a year.

These upgrades are made in response to customer and consultants requests, who can vote for suggested product improvements.

The software allows you to continually improve. Here are our highlights from the latest Salesforce Summer 23 Release Notes. Think: handier features, more AI built in. Etc.

CloudAnalysts has got you covered as we work on immediate benefits and build long term visions simultaneously. We create a must-have starter set of solutions (MVP) for you quickly.

Meanwhile, we also jointly design a roadmap with all your key components, so that, over time, your MVP will be built out into your vision for innovation — en passant leveraging new and upcoming features at the time that it makes most sense for you.

Allowing you to serve your customers best.

As Salesforce experts, we take on board your business objectives, look for resolutions of your pain points, and translate these business imperatives into a technical Service Cloud configuration, that helps you deliver the results you’re after.

To implement your roadmap for you, we build a partnership, with frequent deliverables, ongoing staff communication and hands-on training to staff — so that that everyone in your organisation can get behind your innovation initiatives to build a winning organisation.

Let’s Get You Results Fast

Get a free demo / intro-call to get started with Salesforce with an experienced, certified consultant.

BUSINESS – We work with your internal stakeholders, fleshing out the business vision, followed by a comprehensive set of business requirements.

Together with stakeholders, we create an implementation roadmap for facilitating business process improvements, training staff, and change management.

TECHNOLOGY – Our experienced, certified consulting team configures Salesforce Service Cloud   to realise your business requirements.

To get ROI as fast as possible, in   the first phase of this roadmap we focus on realising an MVP+ with the most significant business benefits.

Review one of our Service Cloud Solutions:

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