Does your company have a or are you planning to form one? In case you’re seeking possibilities to organize the process in the best and most efficient way and want to provide your clients with the utmost service and support, consider looking in the direction of the Service Cloud, a customer relationship management platform that was specially designed by Salesforce for these purposes.In this Salesforce Service Cloud guide, we’ll give you the rundown on what it can be used for, it’s capabilities, benefits, and features. We’ll demonstrate why Salesforce Service Cloud is a good solution for customer support activity and give Salesforce Service Cloud examples of how to apply its features to solve common problems that customer support departments face.
Table of Content
What Is Salesforce Service Cloud?
As stated before, Service Cloud is a Salesforce platform, created for providing top-notch customer support, keeping clients happy, and teams on the same page.
Dwelling on what is Salesforce Service Cloud used for, it’s vital to mention that its main aims are to:
- streamline the processes of customer support teams,
- organize case management and route cases,
- log data orderly and form reports,
- automate various actions to save time and reduce manual work,
- all resulting in customer satisfaction alongside faster and better quality support.
That said, the benefits of Salesforce Service Cloud include personalized attention to each client, the quickness of the first response to inquiries and issues, as well as accessibility on different kinds of devices. Plus, the system is simply integrated with back-ends, other Salesforce tools, and plugins.
Salesforce Service Cloud vs Sales Cloud
Simply put, the Salesforce Service Cloud platform was built for dealing with inbound customer support aims. On the other hand, Salesforce Sales Cloud software is a different product that’s designed for sales teams. The two have many features that are alike, thus, the choice between them depends on your necessities: making sales or providing customer service.
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Salesforce Service Cloud Features & Tools
Although most processes of a customer support team revolve around managing cases, there are also numerous other Service Cloud functions that were created to streamline work processes. Among the major things the Salesforce Service Cloud functionality covers to supplement case management and to enhance the overall work efficiency of the specialists include:
- Case Management (perhaps the most important Salesforce feature in Service Cloud for organizing the work of a customer support department with a case system);
- Agent Workspace (the feature is used for equipping your service team with quick and simple access to all of the things that are necessary for their fruitful work using the agent console);
- Service Process Automation (helps to eliminate a lot of manual work by setting up automatic processes, it also allows to design automated processes which can walk the specialist through what should be done step-by-step when resolving specific cases via tools like scripts and reply suggestions for guidance; optionally, there’s a possibility for AI Chatbot integration which gains knowledge based on actual customer support chats with your clients);
- Knowledge Management (is needed for resolving issues faster, that said, solutions for repetitive issues are jotted down as Q/As or articles to be reused, the answers can be used by employees and even customers in the self-service format if you wish);
- Omni-Channel Routing (used for automatically assigning cases, leads, and tasks to the best available specialist based on their skills or workload to close cases effectively);
- Service Analytics (displays data regarding an employee’s performance, the volumes of cases, to predict customer trends, etc right on the dashboard);
- Telephony Integration (a computer telephony plugin that allows adding calls into Salesforce without the need to use external tools; there also exists Service Cloud Voice software which is an AI-powered voice transcription tool);
- Other features (along with that, Service Cloud provides the opportunity to support clients on a multi-channel level, the possibility to create cases automatically on a web-to-case or email-to-case basis, automation with Macros, asset and order management, as well as the collaborative tool called Quip for helping employees work in a team more successfully, among other functionality).
Now that we’ve briefly overviewed the possible features, let’s find out how they help in overcoming the common customer service team challenges.
Solving Client Support Team Challenges with Service Cloud
There’s no denying that providing quick and high-quality support and keeping clients happy is the core aim of every support team. Nevertheless, customer service agents and entire support teams often face numerous problems in the course of delivering their work.
Below, we’ll walk you through the often occurring issues which prevent support specialists from performing their work in the best possible way and give explanations on how specific Service Cloud tools solve these problems.
1. Taking too long to allocate necessary data due to the lack of tools
In many cases support specialists fail to deliver and help a client not due to the lack of skills but because of not having the right tools. When there’s a struggle in collecting or allocating the needed data, it can cause frustration and wasted time on untangling puzzles of information. This is especially common when serving multiple customers at a time.
Generally, clients don’t like to wait. Therefore, adapting to the fast-paced environment and providing the service within appropriate time frames will allow you to build trust and decrease the chances for the client’s dissatisfaction.The Salesforce Service Cloud provides flexible solutions to make such problems history: an organized Agent Workspace coupled with a comprehensive console and Case Management.
The Agent Workspace is provided by the Service Console which has a handy layout that can be personalized with several panels displaying all the key data upfront and in a structured way. Cases, Accounts, Orders, and anything else that’s needed for speeding up work is right before your eyes. The console also provides ultimate navigation (f.i. tabs and subtabs for every open case so that there’s no need to open dozens of pages in the browser in new tabs and go back and forth). All of this is done for convenience and to save time when managing cases, browsing customer history, dashboards, etc. Plus, the workspace is customizable, thus any needed sections and tools can be pulled out for faster access, f.e. the knowledge management Q/As.Cases are the core for logging, organizing, and resolving customer queries. The main object in Case Management is a case, it documents and tracks information about a client inquiry and helps to process it. Cases have customizable fields, can vary by type, and may even be auto-created on a web-to-case or email-to-case basis. The solution also includes convenient case assignment that can be done not only manually but even by formula, as well as the possibility for case escalation from team to team or to a manager.
2. Resolution times are slow as too much time is wasted on manual work
Having unbalanced workloads is another often occurring issue among client service teams. As a rule, a lot of hours are spent on performing repetitious actions by hand or on making unnecessary movements when helping a client. Of course, this slows down the process of resolving cases.
There are several things the Salesforce Service Cloud offers for this: process automation tools and handy integrations, such as telephony.First of all, the Service Cloud allows to automate numerous processes in order to reduce manual work, some of these can be auto field updates, setting up reminder notifications, or the ease of making send-outs with email templates. What is more, Service Process Automation was designed to help you customize automated service processes specifically for your team. That said, using drag and drop functionality, you may make a path for your specialist that’ll show how a case should be handled step by step, often in the form of a script.One more service process automation feature is the live agent, with additional setup, you can integrate a chat service that would provide customers online help in real-time without delay. The AI chatbot learns from previous replies which were given to your clients using chats and provides personal service.
Another often faced challenge by service teams is while communicating with clients during calls. A plugin solution, Telephony Integration, makes it simple to receive and make calls right from Salesforce. Among the top perks of the integration is that all customer data on the caller is available to the specialist before answering the call. Plus the system automatically logs calls, documenting every detail from activity history to date of the last call or contact history, as well as updates accounts and other linked objects accordingly.
3. Not knowing how to reply to a client’s question
There are many cases when a specialist lacks the necessary knowledge or expertise for handling a problem or answering a customer’s question. In order to not be caught unguarded and to avoid vague answers which can ruin the overall customer experience, the Service Cloud offers to take advantage of its Knowledge Management and Omni-Channel Routing features.The accessibility to various productivity tools that are at hand, including AI-based advice tools that can lead a specialist through the steps of what should be done next, is vital for helping your support specialists grow, become better at what they do, make fewer mistakes, and provide better support. Thus, to make the process faster, it is considered good practice to add the Salesforce Service Cloud Knowledge Management right to the Agent Workspace.
The knowledge base tool was created for specialists to gather the best practice articles and Q&A solutions for others to reuse. By having fast access to the context knowledge base with ready-made solutions that are provided to assist a Support Specialist in handling the case, it becomes much simpler to reply to clients correctly, quickly, and to resolve cases.
What is more, when there’s an imperfect system of incoming case distribution, situations when a specialist faces the need to handle an issue that’s out of his/her competence become a frequent situation. The Omni-Channel Routing tool provides the opportunity to set up how client queries and tasks are directed to queues and to specific specialists based on not only availability and workload, but more importantly on their qualification and skillsets. This means that the system routes the request to the best man for the job, resulting in less unnecessary call transfers and case re-assignments.
4. Ineffective data monitoring and processing
At times managers come across the difficulty of evaluating the performance of their team, work capacity, and other metrics dealing with customers. The Service Cloud Service Analytics provides comprehensive reports and dashboards which make it easy to monitor and keep track of data, such as the number of incoming calls, processed requests, created and resolved cases. The reports can give a clear understanding of the work volumes, help to visualize the progress of teams and individual employees, and make it possible to see the case trends and benchmarks. Topping that, you can build and configure the reports quickly by customizing what you’d like to see, thus even your support agent can make use of this data solution to help make the right decisions. to achieve the best results.
To Conclude
In conclusion, the Service Cloud is indeed a handy platform for optimizing and running customer service processes effectively. The software is very customizable to tailor the needs of each business, allowing everyone to stay on the same page and provide clients a better and faster customer service. We hope that his Salesforce Service Cloud overview was useful, and if you have any additional questions, we’d be glad to offer you and assistance!
