Salesforce Service Cloud: 5 Critical Features

Amit Phaujdar • Last Modified: December 29th, 2022

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Salesforce is a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, powered by Customer 360. It further offers a complementary suite of enterprise applications that focus on Marketing Automation, Data Analytics, Customer Service, and Application Development. Salesforce Service Cloud is built on the Customer Success Platform and focuses on providing help and support to its customers. It allows you to deliver faster, smarter, and more personalized services.

This blog talks about Salesforce Service Cloud in detail. This includes its benefits and features along with a brief overview of Salesforce.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Salesforce

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Salesforce serves as an integrated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that provides a single, shared view across all your departments including Sales, Service, Commerce, and Marketing. Salesforce can help you empower and develop your Sales teams with integrated Lead Management, Forecasting Tools, and the ability to Quote, Price, and Configure every deal. Salesforce provides a comprehensive Cloud platform (Sales Cloud) that gives you the Customer Management Solution that is the right fit for every growth phase of your company.

Salesforce Cloud is an all-in-one Sales tool that also doubles as CRM software. Salesforce Cloud is flexible enough to accommodate businesses of any size or industry and scalable for anything you might need from it. It allows you to access data on the go through its mobile app. It can also help maximize Sales with AppExchange integrations thus boosting business growth.     

Here are a few salient Salesforce features:

  • It allows you to build mobile-friendly Salesforce apps for every employee. This helps boost productivity and build a more connected workforce. Apart from this, it also helps you streamline the employee help desk for faster self-service. 
  • Salesforce offers a boost on its core services with additional functionalities such as Application Integration and Artificial Intelligence. This includes building custom-branded mobile apps; easy integration of data from ERPs, IoT, and Databases; and addition of predictive capabilities to every service and Sales application.
  • You can make your apps more personalized and smart to meet your needs in real-time engagement, service, and purchase.
  • Salesforce provides a highly curated library of industry-specific expert help. This includes Process Flows, Apps, Templates, and Components built to tackle every single issue faced by the user.    

Salesforce CRM ensures a personalized experience with its Customer 360 Platform. Some of the key products offered by Salesforce as a part of their suite are as follows:

  • Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce Service Cloud offers all the tools you might need to strengthen Customer Engagement. It allows you to automate business processes with Intelligent Workflows, support Customer Interactions across each channel, get Actionable Insight into every Customer Interaction, and Drive Revenue with the power of Artificial Intelligence. 
  • Salesforce Analytics (Tableau CRM): Tableau allows you to leverage intuitive Drag-and-Drop Analysis at every skill level. It also allows you to quickly spot visual patterns and share insights across teams to drive growth. 
  • Salesforce Einstein: This is an Artificial Intelligence technology developed by the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. The goal of this tool is to give Marketing and Sales departments more up-to-date views of Sales prospects and customers. 
  • Salesforce Commerce Cloud: The Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to convert more customers with personalized buying experiences. You can implement your strategies faster with easy-to-use tools. This allows you to stay agile and start generating a Higher ROI (Return on Investment) sooner. 
  • Salesforce AppExchange: Salesforce AppExchange is an Enterprise Cloud marketplace. It allows you to find proven experts and apps to help you solve business challenges fast and extend your Salesforce Customer 360 from anywhere. This can be extended across any Department, Industry, and Product. It also offers app guides to help you zero in on the right apps to suit your unique business challenges. 

Introduction to Salesforce Service Cloud

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Salesforce Service Cloud allows you to Streamline Workflow, Automate Service Processes, and Surface Key Topics, Articles, and Experts to transform the agent experience. It simplifies making one-to-one connections with every customer, across multiple channels on any device.

Salesforce Service Cloud can listen and respond to customers across multiple Social Platforms and automatically route cases to the appropriate agent. Since social customer service is integrated into the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, your Social Media team can gather a comprehensive picture of the customer to inform responses.

With Service for Apps, you can easily embed customer support software into applications. In-app mobile support can consist of Screen Sharing, Live Agent Video Chat with On-screen Guided Assistance

The Service Cloud customer service consists of integration with legacy data systems, case management, customer access across all channels, pre-built integration apps, knowledge base, support ticketing, routing, escalation, and queue management.

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Understanding the Benefits of Salesforce Service Cloud

Here are a few benefits of SFDC Service Cloud:

  • With Service Cloud, you can uplevel call center management with smart productivity tools.
  • You can also get valuable and actionable insights into every customer interaction with Salesforce Service Cloud.
  • Service Cloud also allows you to drive upsell and revenue easily with the power of Artificial Intelligence.
  • The clarity of Service Cloud Customer 360 allows you to break down silos and get an inside scoop into every single customer interaction from the first click-through to the last purchase, and so much more.
  • Service Cloud also allows you to empower your teams to deliver mission-critical and safe field service. These field service solutions enable you to get jobs done faster with step-by-step guided flows, automatically schedule the right person for the right jobs, safely complete jobs on the first virtual or in-person visit, and access data offline and online with the field service app.
  • With the Appointment Assistant, your Field Service Team can further strengthen customer engagement. Now you can give customers all the information they need in real-time. For instance, you could inform your customers when their mobile worker will be there, who to expect, and the duration of the appointment.

Here are the pricing plans for the Salesforce Service Cloud that you can use based on different budgets and business requirements:

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Understanding the Features of Salesforce Service Cloud

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Here are a few salient features of Salesforce Service Cloud to help give you a detailed insight into the inner workings of this tool:

Case Management

You can resolve customer support cases faster, by keeping your agents connected and in sync with all the answers, activity, and information they need with Service Cloud. Here are a few salient aspects of Case Management as a Service Cloud feature:

  • Streamline Service Processes: You can drive productivity, process, and consistency the way you want by easily customizing Service Cloud to keep track of your business processes and customer support.
  • Look at the Big Picture: Case Management allows you to see every customer interaction in a chronological timeline, irrespective of channel. Every email update, voicemail, or knowledge article appears in Salesforce’s flexible newsfeed.
  • Automatically Assign the Right Agent: You can make sure cases never fall through the cracks with AI-powered routing recommendations from Salesforce Einstein. Through Case Management, you can intelligently assign cases to the agents best qualified to resolve them.
  • Know what to Focus on: You can also get customer activity alerts and updates when action is needed. You can easily send email responses using pre-written templates in just a few clicks. 

Omni-Channel Routing

With Omni-Routing you can manage availability in real-time and intelligently route the right cases to the ideal agents. Here are a few salient aspects of Omni-Channel Routing:

  • Bolster Efficiency: With Omni-Channel Routing you no longer need to dispatch work or have agents randomly pick work from queues. It intelligently routes work based on business priorities. Work is assigned to employees in real-time. It also allows you to make sure that employees prioritize correctly with the ability to define the size of the work and relative priority.
  • Intelligent Work Routing: You can automatically route leads, cases, and other work to the most appropriate and available employee. It lets administrators structure the Service Cloud to allot work based on Employee Availability, Skill Set, and Capacity to handle incoming work. Employees can easily update their status in real-time, thus making sure that high-priority work always takes precedence.
  • Access to Operational Insights: You can gain visibility into how often your employees spend handling work, any trends in how often they accept vs decline work, and how long they’ve spent in certain statuses. Along with this, you can also report on Average Wait Times, Service Level Agreement Adherence, and Average Handle Times. You can leverage these analytics to React, Diagnose, and Fix problem areas faster.

Lightning Service Console

The Lightning Service Console lets you unify your agent experience. It does this by placing all the information needed by agents right at their fingertips. Here are a few salient aspects of Lightning Service Console:

  • Deliver a Great Customer Experience: With Lightning Service Console, customers can expect the same fast, personalized, and smart service regardless of the channel they use to interact. Cases from every channel find their way into the agent console where agents can look at a customer’s account information, purchasing history, and profile in one location. 
  • Maximize Agent Productivity: You can maximize agent productivity by placing all the information agents might need in one place. This includes customer profiles and subject matter experts placed at the agent’s fingertips. This empowers your customer service team to answer customer questions the first time, correctly anticipate customer needs, and deliver world-class customer service solutions every time. 
  • Simplify the Agent Experience: The responsive, dynamic layout of the dashboards in the console makes it easy for agents to put the information where they need it. Its instinctive design puts all of the most commonly used actions right where your agents need them.

Telephony Integration

With the Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI), you can lower your agent’s average handle times and improve customer satisfaction. Here are a few salient aspects of Telephony Integration:

  • Automatically Log Your Calls: This helps simplify your life by having any notes you take during a call logged automatically and associated with objects like cases, contact records, or anything you create.
  • Call Customers with Just a Click: It helps cut back on hours of lost productivity by turning every phone number in the Salesforce database into a clickable link.
  • Know who’s Calling Before they Speak: With Telephony Integration, you can instantly get a profile screen showing their account record or customer information. This helps you identify your customers before you pick up the call.
  • Control Calls without Touching the Phone: You can make outgoing calls, transfer them to another agent, put them on hold, or add people for a conference call. You can do all this and much more without leaving the Salesforce Service Console. 

Workflows and Approvals

Workflows let you save time by automating your internal processes and procedures, including any extra steps required to keep things moving. Here are a few salient aspects of Workflows and Approvals:

  • Visual Simplicity: You can design entire processes in one place with the powerful Process Builder. This is a point-and-click interface that you can use to create and update records, launch workflows, log calls, send emails, and so much more.
  • Simplified Approvals to Keep Cases Moving: It also allows you to automate your business request approval process. You can specify the sequence of steps that are required to approve a record. This includes what to do at each point of the process and who to ask.
  • Automating Workflows: You can eliminate repetitive and manual chores by automating manual tasks. Workflows can help speed up your work by automating field updates, task assignments, and email responses.

Conclusion

This blog talks about the different features and benefits of Salesforce for Customer Service in great detail. It also gives a brief introduction to Salesforce and its product suite to help you improve the productivity of your workforce.

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