The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Service Cloud for Customer Service

The modern customer demands proactive involvement of service providers, tailored assistance, and seamless omnichannel experiences in addition to quick issue resolution. However, this omnichannel customer experience tends to overwhelm customer care representatives due to the large volumes of data. And while getting access to this data is crucial for delivering great customer experiences, it is quite challenging for support teams to go through multiple lines of legacy data stored in databases, spreadsheets, or even siloed systems. This is where Salesforce Service Cloud Implementation proves to be beneficial.

The features of Salesforce Service Cloud help brands provide engaging customer service solutions. This helps a business scale its operations with ease and provide omnichannel experiences to customers across various touchpoints. With the implementation of Service Cloud, businesses can improve their customer service with in-app support and live agent, social media, self-service communities, and knowledge centers.

Service Cloud is one of the most connected and popular solutions for customer service. Salesforce Service Cloud solutions are built on the Salesforce Customer Success platform that provides a 360-degree view of customers and helps organizations deliver smarter and more personalized experiences. By creating a connected knowledge base from a single platform, Service Cloud allows businesses to analyze the past activity data of customers. This allows businesses to create tailored customer interactions and upsell their products/services.

Key Features of Salesforce Service Cloud

Here are a few important Salesforce Service Cloud features that make it stand amongst the most preferred customer service solutions:

1. Lightning Console

The Lightning Console unifies the experiences of customer service agents by equipping them with information from customer profiles, case histories, and dashboards.

2. Live Agent

This feature allows customers to connect with an agent in real time. Customers get access to a real-time 1:1 chat anytime and from any device. These chats are quickly routed to subject matter experts.

3. Communities

The Communities feature allows customers to get the answers they need more quickly. It equips both agents and customers to get access to the tools that make way for faster problem-solving and greater engagement.

4. Knowledge Base

This Salesforce Service Cloud feature provides agents with a repository of FAQs and articles to resolve customer issues quickly.

5. Field Service Management

The field service capabilities of Service Cloud help schedule, dispatch, and manage mobile workers. This ensures that field agents arrive on time with the relevant tools and information to resolve the issues of customers on-site.

6. Omni-Channel Routing

Service Cloud routes customer inquiries from different channels such as email, chat, and social media to the relevant agents. This promotes faster response times and effective case resolution.

7. Mobile App

The Salesforce mobile app helps agents and managers stay connected, access important customer information, and resolve customer issues on the go.

Reasons for Investing in Salesforce Service Cloud

Before investing in a software solution or service, businesses like to consider the ROI of their investments. The same goes for Salesforce Service Cloud implementation services.

Service Cloud provides apps for contact centers, employee centers, self-service, customer service, and field center. These apps help businesses provide a connected and complete experience. The extensive Salesforce Service Cloud features help organizations offer proactive and customized solutions to their customers, ensure guaranteed customer success, and turn agents into trusted advisors. When businesses provide their customers with positive service experiences, it motivates the customers to consider the products/services of the business again.

With the help of Salesforce Service Cloud, a business can achieve the following:

• Streamline workflows and automate processes to route cases directly to agents. Service Console helps agents in viewing complete information about their customers, their behavior, history, recent purchases, preferences, etc., from a single dashboard. This helps increase customer satisfaction and case resolution numbers.
• Authorize agents to provide customer service across any device and channel such as SMS, phone, email, social media, self-service websites, etc.
• Enable customers to self-service their queries, making it easy for them to get answers to their questions with solutions of the Salesforce Service Cloud portal and self-service site. Create branded self-service sites with the help of Experience Builder templates and provide solutions that leverage the AI capabilities of Salesforce Einstein.
• Connect on-site and off-site workforce to see user journeys with the help of the Salesforce Field Service mobile app to provide connected solutions from mobile phone to field.
• Create macros in the Salesforce Service Console for grouping together a few manual and repetitive steps and automate them to be triggered with the help of a single click.
• Turn agents into trusted advisors for customers. Since Salesforce Service Cloud solutions connect marketing, sales, and customer service departments under one roof, sales representatives can view all important information about users. This way sales reps can provide users with special offers, incentives, and personalized solutions depending on their purchase behavior.

Challenges of Customers and Service Teams Resolved by Salesforce Service Cloud

Challenge- 1

Difficulty in meeting customer expectations
The modern customer is equipped with a range of information, choices, and data about the products/services they want to buy. In the present competitive world crowded with thousands of ecommerce businesses, meeting the expectations of customers is quite a challenging task.

Solution
Salesforce Service Cloud helps businesses tap into customer insights with the help of built-in analysis tools that help improve customer experiences and boost their satisfaction levels.

Challenge- 2

Siloed Customer Service
Customer Service agents generally don’t have a complete view of their users. They have to depend on various tools to get unified case history information. This makes it tough for them to provide a desired solution, resulting in longer wait times and reduced customer satisfaction.

Solution
The case management tool of Salesforce Service Cloud allows representatives to track user information on a single dashboard and communicate through their desired channel.

When customers post comments on the social page of a company, agents can route the posts to the support team and also automate customer feedback.

Challenge- 3

Inefficient Ticketing System
It is tough to track inquiries or manage case numbers on a spreadsheet. A lot of incoming requests in the inbox make the whole task difficult to track and organize.

Solution
The Help Desk features of Salesforce Service Cloud help to automatically assign incoming cases to the right agent from the right team. The features also enable customer success managers to track their team’s progress. Businesses can streamline notifications and automate processes to automatically route cases to sales representatives without letting your inboxes overflow.

Challenge- 4

Missing Context About the Ticket Raised
When there’s no holistic view of the case, sales reps have to depend on voice transcripts and old notes, which generally require a lot of effort and time.

Solution
The Interactive Voice Response (IVR) feature of the Salesforce Service Cloud automatically routes inbound calls to the queue. The Search Console of IVR offers a unified view of customer data that includes case history, contact information, and account information to fasten case resolution and boost customer satisfaction.

Challenge- 5

Shortage of Talent
Customer Service teams often have to deal with repetitive and mundane tasks. This also results in many professionals not wanting to pursue customer service as a career.

Solution
Salesforce Service Cloud features of automated routing, case management, service cloud console, and telephony integration make it easy for the sales reps to contribute to customer service efficiency. The features also decrease the cost of customer service and increase employee retention.

Challenge- 6

Evolving Market Trends and User Behavior
Generally, service teams measure customer success with Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Nevertheless, with evolving trends, dynamic user behavior, and changing methodologies, it becomes difficult for sales reps to boost customer retention rates and improve customer experiences.

Solution
The Salesforce Service Cloud Customer Success Management (CSM) tool helps measure and analyze user sentiments and preferences across different channels. This aids in the prediction of customer expectations set both in the present and future. The information, in turn, helps sales reps improve their CSAT scores and alleviate the risk of lower customer churn rates.

Summing Up

Salesforce Service Cloud implementation helps businesses strengthen customer service and improve efficiency of customer service teams. The Service Cloud platform is scalable and customizable, improving service delivery, agent productivity, and customer satisfaction. As organizations increasingly look for ways to enhance customer experience, investing in Service Cloud becomes crucial. This will not only help businesses meet and exceed customer expectations but also promote lasting business success.