Salesforce Service Cloud has been boosting agent productivity and communication efficiency since 2009. And it’s proving to be a success: the platform has outgrown older Salesforce products, becoming the company’s largest revenue-generating service in 2023, as it earned a revenue of close to $7 billion.
This Salesforce Service Cloud overview talks about all the features and benefits that make Service Cloud the successful platform that it is. Before that, let’s quickly discuss the background.
What Is Salesforce Service Cloud?
Salesforce Service Cloud is a top-of-line help desk. It integrates support requests from all channels into a single ticketing system and automates service processes with AI-powered tools.
The majority of the companies using Service Cloud come from the tech industry, with information technology and services making up 21% and computer software at 12%. The financial services industry comes third, making up 5% of the pie.
42% of Service Cloud customers are large businesses with more than a thousand employees, 41% are medium-sized, and 17% are small companies with less than fifty employees.
Salesforce Service Cloud Features Overview
This Salesforce Service Cloud overview gives you a better understanding of what the platform can do by highlighting its features and how they can help your support teams. Here’s a quick discussion of the Service Cloud features that can elevate the way your support teams operate.
Ticketing system
Salesforce help desk enables multi-channel support from a single workstation, making it easy for agents to communicate with customers and resolve issues. It features a dashboard that allows users to see the tickets and their statuses at a glance, making it easy to prioritize tasks and complete cases. Skills-based routing and milestone tracking streamline workflows, boosting the efficiency of your teams.
Omni-channel routing
Omni-channel routing automatically directs customer requests to the appropriate queue, ensuring they’re evenly distributed among agents. This customizable feature helps ensure you’re not giving agents more work than they can handle. It also allows you to designate agents to specific types of assignments.
Case management
With Salesforce’s case management, your agents get a chronological view of a customer’s interactions with your brand across all channels, allowing them to solve issues much more quickly.
Besides this, the feature automatically routes cases to the agents with the right skills and availability, allowing your teams to increase the rate at which they resolve issues at first contact. It also streamlines the workflow, guiding agents through the next steps until the case is resolved.
Source: Salesforce
Generative AI-powered service replies
Einstein service replies leverage the power of generative AI to create responses to queries on WhatsApp, SMS, and other channels. It analyzes messages from customers in real time, digs up information from your company’s knowledge base, and then crafts human-sounding replies. Agents can share these replies right away or edit them before hitting send.
Source: Salesforce
Knowledge management for agents
The knowledge management feature helps agents quickly find information when addressing customer concerns.
Powered by AI, the tool recommends articles relevant to the issue at hand, delivering them right where the agents are working. Agents can select the best article, send it to the customer, attach it to the case, or simply use the information to guide them as they address the problem.
Source: Salesforce
Customer self-service
Like any reliable help desk solution, Salesforce Service Cloud offers a self-service feature for commonly asked questions. Equipped with generative AI-powered search, it takes answers out of your knowledge base and brings them to customers via your help center or conversations with your chatbot.
As a result, the number of queries that reach your agents is reduced.
Incident management
The incident management tool built into the Service Cloud in Salesforce allows your teams to monitor systems and identify problems before they create widespread issues. It automatically creates an incident report, alerts the experts assigned to resolve issues, and keeps customers informed.
The incident resolution feature enables the immediate identification of affected assets, the root cause of the issue, and possible solutions. It also makes it easy to collaborate with experts, as it integrates swarming (collaborative problem-solving) into the Service Cloud for the Slack app.
Source: Salesforce
Field service management
A customizable field service mobile app allows your employees to use the platform and save changes out of the office as they perform onsite consultations, maintenance activities, installations, repairs, and other field services.
The app provides access to customer data, historical interactions, equipment maintenance, and service records. Workers get just the context they need to prioritize the right onsite tasks and enhance customer satisfaction.
Source: Salesforce
Work order management
The work order management feature enables organizations to efficiently manage and track field service operations (work orders), eliminating manual paperwork and streamlining the entire process.
The feature allows field service agents to schedule and assign work orders to suitable agents, make sure they have the necessary information and parts to complete their tasks successfully, and update the status of work orders in real time, keeping your customer and teams in the loop.
Source: Salesforce
Asset service management
Asset management provides tools for real-time tracking, maintaining, and optimizing the performance of assets, such as equipment, machinery, devices, or any other items that are critical to an organization's operations. The feature makes it easy for users to effectively manage and maintain their assets throughout their lifecycle, monitor service outcomes, and prevent issues.
This function features a centralized database of all assets, a calendar for maintenance activities, integration with field service operations, contract management, automated work order creation, as well as reporting and analytics.
Analytics
Salesforce Service Cloud users can gain a consolidated view of critical data, make informed decisions, enhance their teams’ efficiency, and provide exceptional customer service—all thanks to the analytics feature.
Aside from creating custom reports, the feature allows customer support teams to compile multiple reports, charts, and metrics into real-time dashboards. These dashboards can be customized to showcase the most relevant information, including case resolution times, customer satisfaction scores, agent performance, and beyond.
Source: Salesforce
Looking at all these Service Cloud features, we’re sure you can now picture just how the platform can change the way you do things.
What Are the Benefits of Service Cloud?
This Salesforce Service Cloud overview wouldn’t be complete without a list of benefits. Whether you’d like to scale your operations to meet increasing customer demand or you’d simply like to boost your agents’ productivity to reduce costs, the Salesforce help desk is just waiting to be of service.
Increased productivity
The Salesforce service desk allows agents to offer AI-powered support to customers across all channels—all from a single workstation (Salesforce agent console).
Whether customers are contacting you via phone, email, or messaging apps your teams can respond to them using the same user-friendly dashboard. And because the system routes customer concerns to the most appropriate queues, your agents will always be well-equipped to address the concerns hurled their way.
Personalized service due to integration of communication medium
Because Salesforce service desk integrates all modes of communication into a single platform, it makes it easy for agents to connect with customers and provide personalized support. And because all data is stored in the same location, support teams won’t have to grapple for the information they need to get to know their customers and provide value-added service.
Decreased agent workload due to automation
Service Cloud’s Einstein AI automates service processes, ensuring customers receive full support.
For instance, Service Cloud automation ensures customers always get answers to their queries, no matter what time of the day it is. AI-powered chatbots can quickly address common customer concerns, speeding up issue resolution and leaving agents with fewer cases in their queue.
Quick decision-making
Because Service Cloud allows agents to view all crucial data in a single location, it makes it easy for them to quickly make decisions as they address customer concerns. Opening just one dashboard enables them to access past customer interactions, information on the work agents have done on each case, and in-depth analytics.
You can also customize the dashboard to display the most relevant KPIs, allowing your teams to adjust their goals as needed and make the right decisions to achieve those objectives.
Enhanced collaboration
Because the Salesforce service desk is cloud-based, your agents can access and use the system anytime, anywhere. Besides, due to the case swarming feature, it’s easy for your teams to work on the same case, no matter if they’re working onsite or remotely.
Perfect integration of sales and service
Because Service Cloud integrates with sales tools, it enables strong collaboration between the sales and support teams. This then helps ensure a great post-purchase customer experience, making it easy for your sales teams to retain customers and secure repeat purchases.
Integration with your existing apps and tools
You can integrate Service Cloud with the apps you are already using. It’s designed to work with popular productivity, marketing, and collaboration tools.
The list includes Google Workspace, Dropbox, Slack, QuickBooks, MailChimp, LinkedIn, DocuSign, HelloSign, Jira Software, CodeScience, and ActiveCampaign.
Scalability
Salesforce is built to handle millions of users. This means you can scale your operations as rapidly as required—all without worrying about degraded performance.
Salesforce puts a lot of emphasis on performance, ensuring they’re prepared for any surge in customer demand. It has built a system architecture that makes it easy to integrate additional database servers and accommodate more users.
And of course, these amazing benefits come at a price. In this Salesforce Service Cloud overview, we’ll take a look at the platform’s pricing scheme.
Service Cloud Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?
Service Cloud comes in various pricing plans, depending on the features included. Here are the five plans for businesses to consider:
Starter ($25 monthly for every user)
This version of the Service Cloud allows businesses to quickly kick off their new system with basic sales, service, and email outreach tools. It comes with Salesforce case management, console, knowledge base, and analytics (customizable dashboards and reports).
Professional ($80 monthly for every user)
This is a complete service CRM, with a long feature list. Case swarming, telephony integration, and omni-channel case routing are among them.
Enterprise ($165 monthly for every user)
Enterprise is the platform’s most popular plan. Apart from Starter and Professional’s capabilities, it includes AI for customer service, workflow automation, and a self-service help center.
Unlimited ($330 monthly for every user)
If you want near-to-unlimited CRM power, this is the plan for you. Along with features from three lower tiers, you get 24/7/365 support, AI-powered chatbots, and live chat.
Unlimited+ ($500 monthly for every user)
Unlimited+ combines all the possible features of Salesforce Service Cloud. Apart from the functionalities mentioned above, it’s equipped with robust generative and predictive AI capabilities and integrates with Data Cloud, Tableau Analytics (data and channels), and Slack.
Service Cloud lets you choose a plan that best matches your needs as a business. If you are a small business with basic needs, you can begin with the Starter suite to avoid incurring unnecessary costs. You can later upgrade to a more fitting plan as you scale your business.
Why Do Businesses Move from Salesforce Service Cloud?
We didn’t only put together this Salesforce Service Cloud overview to show you the merits of the platform. It’s not unheard of for businesses to leave Service Cloud and move to a new help desk. And they do so for a number of reasons.
For starters, the Service Cloud in Salesforce can be relatively expensive for smaller businesses. Plus, the platform can be too complex and overwhelming for organizations with simpler needs. Even integrating it with your existing software and apps can be a problem. Companies that don’t have dedicated personnel to configure Service Cloud may find it easier to move to a platform with better usability.
There are also those that don’t necessarily dislike Salesforce Service Cloud. Their business may simply have evolved, with their requirements and needs changing alongside. Or they may have found a competing platform with features and capabilities that are more aligned with their needs and preferences.
Verdict of the Salesforce Service Cloud Overview
There are countless help desks out there but not all of them have a list of features as long as that of Service Cloud. Salesforce is a big industry player. It has at its disposal all the resources needed to keep up with the latest technologies and trends. Working with Salesforce allows you to equip your teams with best-in-line tools and processes.
After reading this Salesforce Service Cloud overview, you may decide to move to Salesforce Service Cloud. Either way, we can help you with your data migration needs with our reliable and customizable service. Start a free Demo here and try how your customer service data looks like on Service Cloud.
