Salesforce Service Cloud: How it Fuels the Customer Experience

Author: Nick Van Haeften

Whether you’re new to the world of Salesforce or a seasoned Salesforce pro, their rate of innovation means you might not know as much as you’d like to about certain products. With this in mind, we’ll be breaking down one of their most popular products: Salesforce Service Cloud.

It’s popular for a reason. Salesforce itself states that Service Cloud delivers a seamless user experience and a 360-degree customer view, but what exactly is it? How does it work and how can it help your business?

What is Service Cloud?

Service Cloud is classified as a customer support platform or customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It was designed to improve how businesses interact with their customers, as well as empower businesses to make better decisions.

It does this specifically by centralizing customer data and providing easy-to-use tools for agents, customers, and management. To break that down further, Service Cloud:

• Is built on the Salesforce Customer-360 Platform
  • This platform unifies data.
  • By unifying data, separate systems can access the same information in different ways, across different channels.
  • It also provides a more complete view of the customer because data is more up-to-date and balanced.
• Has tools designed for CRM that have access to that unified data, even as more data is being added.
  • Tools for agents to provide faster and more optimized customer service.
  • Tools for customers which enable better self-service.
  • And tools for executives to analyze data across all aspects of Service Cloud.

How Salesforce Service Cloud Works

To review how Salesforce Service Cloud works, let’s expand on the features mentioned above for agents, customers, and management.

Agents:

• What agents see with Service Cloud is the previously mentioned customer data in one location.
• The tools provided are also in one location.
  • This includes:
    • Case information, priority, and status.
    • Timers and milestone trackers for better response times.
    • Relevant case information.
    • Any macros created for faster case processing.
    • The option to respond to a customer via their preferred contact method.
    • The option to reroute cases easily and efficiently.

Customers:

• A customer’s experience with Service Cloud is designed around ease of use and accessibility.
• The key here is adding self-service and more options to support customers however they choose.
  • In addition, there is the option to create branded communities for peer-to-peer, knowledge base, and support team issue resolution.
    • Communities can be accessed however customers would like.
    • Communities provide personalized content, including relevant articles and customer experiences.
    • Recommendations on products and services can easily be made or found.
    • The option to contact support from the community site is available.
    • Customers can get case updates from the community site.

Executives:

• How Service Cloud tools work for executives is based on team performance and business analytics.
  • Prebuilt and custom dashboards and reports can be used to view data.
  • Data can be viewed remotely if needed.
  • There is the option to make adjustments as needed, due to real-time tracking.
  • Customers can be prioritized.
  • Customer satisfaction is tracked.
  • Information can easily be shared with anyone who needs it.

How Service Cloud Fuels Your Business

When reading through how Service Cloud works, there are some obvious benefits. Namely, it’s providing customer support that is consistent, faster, personalized and more complete. Moreover, there are some very real ways those benefits help fuel business growth and development.

The Service Cloud platform brings a 40% increase in agent productivity, 41% faster first contact resolution and 34% increase in customer retention.

• Service Cloud is built to scale as a business grows, making it a long-term solution.
• Business decisions can be based on more accurate data and development based on a business’s unique customer base.
• Its comprehensive record-keeping means it’s easier to respond to compliance concerns.
• Ease of use and the ability to work more efficiently can translate to lower employee stress, which can result in better employee retention, which ultimately lowers your costs.

There are more benefits than we can cover here, but we’ll cover one more, lastly:

• Service Cloud is completely customizable.

Not only is it scalable, but its potential for customization means endless options for both businesses and their service teams.