Salesforce being a CRM is used to connect people and information. In this blog, I am going to explain one of the core service – Salesforce Service Cloud and how it revolutionized customer support by making interactions easier between an organization and its customers. In my previous blog, you learned how to create a custom Salesforce Application. Moving forward, I will help you understand how the service cloud in Salesforce can add value to your business. First, I will explain the need for it, what it is and what all services it provides to engage your customers. In the end, I will explain one use case on how Coca-Cola has been extremely successful in enhancing their customer’s experience using Service Cloud. You can learn more from the Salesforce certification course.
So, let’s get started with why your organization should choose it?
Why Salesforce Service Cloud?
If your company deeply cares about the customer service, then Salesforce Service Cloud is what you should go for. Irrespective of whether you are in B2C or B2B domain, you will have several customers raising tickets and queries on a regular basis. These tickets will be received by your service agents. It helps you in tracking and solving these tickets efficiently.
This is not the only way how you can transform customer experience. Let’s dig deeper and see how it is creating an impression.
- Maximize Agent Productivity – Using Service Cloud, agents can work from anywhere. With the easy management options available (such as web-based application, mobile device, knowledge base) , the agent productivity is enhanced leading to reduction of overhead costs of agents.
- Transforms Customer experience – Customer relations are drastically enhanced – connecting one to one with every customer via live agents. You can increase your customer loyalty, satisfaction and customer retention, leading to repeat business from existing customers, increase in LTV (Lifetime value) of your customers, positive word of mouth for your brand.
- Security – Your data is completely safe and secure with the Service Cloud platform. It follows a multilayered approach to protect the information which is vital to your business.
- Leverage Social Media Platforms – You can also interact with your customers on social media such as Facebook or Twitter in real-time.
- Case Tracking – Tracking helps you in faster case resolution. This leads to better management of a person’s day to day activities and manual errors are drastically reduced.
To sum up, Salesforce Service Cloud definitely helps in improving your operational processes leading to better experience for your customers. Based on a study done across companies using this service cloud, growth in performance metric has been drastically increased. If you see the below infographic, agent productivity increased by 40%, case resolution increased by 41%, which eventually led to a 31% increase in customer retention.
This growth illustrates why people prefer Salesforce Service Cloud and how it plays an important role in improving your customer support team.
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Now let’s understand what Salesforce Service Cloud is and what services it has to offer.
What is Salesforce Service Cloud?
Salesforce offers Service Cloud as Software as a Service. Service Cloud is built on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, giving you a 360-degree view of your customers and enabling you to deliver smarter, faster and more personalized service.
With Salesforce Service Cloud, you can create a connected knowledge base, enable live agent chat, manage case interactions – all at one platform. You can have personalized customer interactions or even up-sell your products/ services based on his/her past activity data.
Now, you may be wondering how to access Service Cloud. Let me walk you through the steps to access a Service Cloud Console.
Step 1: Login to login.salesforce.com
Step 2: Create a SF Console App
Step 3: Choose its display
Step 4: Customize push notifications
Step 5: Grant users Console Access – Sc User
What services it offers?
As I mentioned earlier, Salesforce Service Cloud offers case tracking and knowledge base features. It also offers several other services that will enable you to provide a differentiated customer experience. You can refer to the image below to see what it has to provide you with.
You can take your console to the next level by learning the following features in Salesforce:
Case Management – Any customer issues raised are usually captured and tracked as cases. Cases can be further classified into the following:
- Email-To-Case: Email-To-Case helps you create a case automatically when an email is sent to one of your company’s email addresses, such as support@edureka.co. These generated cases will be displayed in an ‘Emails related list’. This Emails related list includes all emails sent by your customer on a particular case, as well as the email threads.
- Web-to-Case: Web-to-case helps you create a new case automatically in Salesforce whenever a support request comes directly from your company’s website. To enable it, you can go to Setup → Build → Self-service → Web-to-case settings.
Check the “Enable Web-to-Case” checkbox. You can select an Auto-response template and select the default case origin as ‘Web’. - Escalation and Auto-Response: Case escalation rules are used to reassign and optionally notify individuals when a case is not closed within a specified time period. Also, you can configure auto-response rules to respond to cases either from the web or email.
Related Article: Learn about Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
At the core of the Service Cloud lies the ‘Case’ module. Let us understand the Case module with an example. Assume in a large organization like Coca-Cola, few of the employees’ systems get crashed, let’s call it as ‘breakdown of laptops’. Now you need to fix this as soon as possible to ensure business continuity. Service Cloud helps you track the progress and provides you with all the necessary information of every Coca-Cola agent. You can solve the problem by creating a case. You can then assign them as ‘high’ priority and also categorize the origin of this case (such as phone, email or web) and then click on ‘Save’. Refer the below screenshot to get a better understanding.
Solutions – You can categorize your solutions into query types – making your solution search easier and closing the case faster. With this, the agent does not need to create a new solution to existing queries every time. This helps in enhancing your agent productivity. Solutions do not need any additional license.
For the same Coca-Cola scenario, if you want to solve a case as an agent, then you will definitely search for a solution. Firstly, you can check whether the solution has been already present or not. If it is not present, then your admin can create a solution stating that the case has been resolved and hence can be closed. You can refer to the screenshot attached below.
As you can see in the above screenshot, I have created a solution- ‘Laptop Solution’ that displays the title, status and the details of the solution created.
Knowledge – Salesforce Knowledge is a knowledge base where users can edit, create and manage content. Knowledge articles are documents of information. Customers can go to the company’s website and search for solutions. Knowledge articles can be associated with a case before it is closed unlike solutions. Salesforce Knowledge needs a separate license to be purchased.
Communities – Communities are a way to collaborate with business partners and customers, distributors, resellers and suppliers who are not part of your organization. Typically, these are the people who are not your regular SFDC users, but you want to provide them some channel to connect with your organization and provide them access to some data as well. To learn more, get Salesforce developer certification and become certified.
In Salesforce, if you go to the ‘Call Center’ dropdown, you will find Success Community. A Salesforce user can use their user id and password to login there. This community is accessible to all the developers, functional consultants or admins. In this community, user can search anything as it has a lot of things like documentation, articles, knowledge, feed, questions and many more. For example: If you want to know about record type in Salesforce, then you can search here. Have a look at the screenshot attached below.
As you can see in the above search, you got a lot of customer’s problems, documentation, known issues, ideas etc. You can now start exploring them, understand the major issues faced by the customers and fix them accordingly.
Console – Agent console provides unified agent experience. It reduces response time by placing all the information together. In a console, you can find everything from customer profiles, to case histories, to dashboards – all in one place.
As I have shown you the basics of how to set up a Salesforce console in the beginning of this blog. Admin can grant Console Access to the users, Service Cloud gives you the console access where you can assign users to it. Refer the below screenshot, you can assign user profile for the console. Also, you can assign the Service Cloud user license to agents with those profiles so that they can start using your console.
Social Media – Service Cloud lets you leverage social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter to engage visitors. With Salesforce Social Studio, customer requests are escalated directly to your social service team. Social media plays an important role in bridging the gap in virtual world, engaging them in real time.
Salesforce Service Cloud is all about providing services to your customers and building a relationship with them. You can use other features such as call center, email & chat, phone, google search, contracts and entitlements, chatter and call Scripting.
How Much Does Salesforce Service Cloud Cost?
It Offers three pricing packages- Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited. You can refer to the table below and select your plan accordingly.
| Professional – $75 USD/user/month | Enterprise – $150 USD/user/month | Unlimited – $300 USD/user/month |
Case management Service contracts and entitlements Single Service Console app Web and email response Social customer service Lead-contact account management Order management Opportunity tracking Chatter collaboration Customizable reports and dashboards CTI integration Mobile access and administration Limited process automation Limited number of record types, profiles, and role permission sets Unlimited apps and tabs | Advanced case management | Live Agent web chat |
“Our agents love Salesforce CRM Service. They tell us how easy it is to use and how phenomenal it is when it comes to driving a better customer experience” – Charter
This is how Salesforce Service Cloud has revolutionized the way customers interact with organizations using services over the internet. Now, let’s examine how Coca-Cola implemented it to solve its business challenges.
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Salesforce Service Cloud Use Case: Coca-Cola
It is an integrated platform to connect employees, customers, and suppliers around the world.
Earlier, Coca-Cola was facing several issues while managing their customers. Some of them are listed below:
- The company’s in-house repair facility formerly had technicians who were tracking their jobs on paper. They took a lot of time and effort.
- Call center and repair department suffered from frequent downtime.
- Lack of speed, functionality, scalability and connectivity with a fully-mobile experience.
- Slow mobile app sync-up.
- Overall unsatisfactory user experience.
“In the past, big companies outcompeted smaller companies. But that’s history. Today, the fast companies outcompete the slow companies,” explained Ulrik Nehammer – CEO of Coca-Cola.
Now when they are connected to the Salesforce Service Cloud, technicians are alerted in real-time on customer issues. This helps reduce response time dramatically. Also, call center support agents receive instant access to customer history. With all of this, productivity of Coca-Cola Germany’s technical services has shot up by 30%.
A Big Fix for Coca-Cola
With the Service Cloud, they wanted to understand their customers’ need and cater to them more effectively. Here are some key points that contributed to their excellence.
- Customer satisfaction – One to one support to customers through any channels or product with services for app like video chat or agents instantly guiding them to solutions.
- Mobile App – Using app mobile support, customers can interact via live agent video chat, screen sharing and on-screen guided assistance. These services transform customer support resulting in making their customers happy.
- Analytics – Using Salesforce Service Cloud, all information is gathered and evaluated through custom dashboard. Coca-Cola performed analysis to check the past transactions and immediately took action at the location they serve. This helped them in making better and profitable decisions in lesser time.
- Agent productivity is supercharged – With features such as email-to-case, skills-based routing, milestone tracking, Service Cloud gave their agents the tool to respond quickly and efficiently to customers on any channel. This is how Coca-Cola has enhanced the overall productivity.
“This has been a massive step forward for us,” said Andrea Malende, business process expert and mobile solutions in Coca-Cola. “I’m amazed how quick and smooth the implementation was.”
This is how Coca-Cola implemented Salesforce Service Cloud, thus making its customers happy. Several other use case stories show how various companies have benefited from and grown their businesses. Check out our Salesforce Architect Certification program to become the master!
Integrations available for Salesforce Service Cloud
It also supports integration with various applications and business systems as shown in the image below:
Since everyone and everything is connected on one platform, you should definitely go for Salesforce Service Cloud. Hope you enjoyed reading my blog, you can also go through the video below for a detailed explanation and demo.
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