This is why it is important to provide them with adequate support services.
Gone are the days when it was okay for businesses to provide generic guides, manuals, and handbooks to their customers in the name of customer service. Customers today demand quick, personalized, and interactive support. If you are willing to build a long and healthy relationship with your customers, you need to make sure that they feel heard and their issues are resolved in the best way possible.
If you need to be there for your customers any time of the day/night and provide them with holistic support, you should consider implementing Salesforce Service Cloud within your organization.
What Is Salesforce Service Cloud?
Salesforce Service Cloud is a highly sought-after Salesforce product that allows you to provide quick and personalized support to your customers. The CRM platform allows you to handle your cases in a streamlined and automated manner to tailor your services based on the specific needs of your customers.
Salesforce Service Cloud is a solution that acts as a customer service platform and a helpdesk to provide wholesome support to your customers. It provides users with a range of different features and tools such as service consoles, process automation, dashboards, analytics, and much more.
Key Features Of Salesforce Service Cloud
Seamless Case Management
Case management is the primary feature offered by Salesforce Service Cloud. Whenever a customer faces any issue and decided to seek help from your organization, it leads to the creation of a new case.
There are three distinct ways in which the Service Cloud allows users to create and manage cases – web-to-case, email-to-case, and escalation.
Web-to-case revolves around the automated creation of a new case when a user receives a support request from the company’s website. This is when your customers seek support through your official website. You can either choose to handle such cases by routing them to the right agents or provide your customers with a personalized auto-response.
Email-to-case allows Salesforce Service Cloud users to create a new case when an email looking for support has been sent to the designated email ID of your business. The software displays all these cases in a list called “Emails Related List.” This list contains multiple emails related to a single case and different email threads.
If a case is not closed within the pre-determined period of time, Salesforce Service Cloud allows you to use the case escalation rules to reassign the concerned case and inform the customer about the same.
Einstein Bots
Conversational AI has brought a revolution in the domain of customer services. The technology involves the creation of AI chatbots that interact with customers, understand the context of their questions/issues, and provide them with personalized solutions without routing the cases to support agents right away.
Salesforce Service Cloud employs these virtual assistants in the form of Einstein bots. These chatbots can be used to overcome the unnecessary delays caused in resolving basic issues faced by your customers. If a customer raises a simple query, they can get it resolved by interacting with the chatbots. In case they are not satisfied with the response, they can ask the chatbots to route their case to a suitable support agent. This allows you to bring in manual assistance only when required.
Salesforce Knowledge
The enterprise knowledge base is one of the most important assets possessed by your organization. It contains all important information regarding your company, its offerings, and the customers.
Salesforce Service Cloud allows you to optimize Salesforce Knowledge, an extensive knowledge base where you can create, edit, and manage content. If you are using chatbots to provide the initial level of support, they would scan the knowledge base to provide personalized solutions to your customers.
Similarly, if a case is routed to one of your support agents, Salesforce Knowledge provides them with all information related to the concerned case and the customer involved. This provides your agent with enough information to understand the issue at hand and tailor a resolution best fitted for the situation.
Agent Console
Agent Console is a tool designed specifically for support agents to make their work easier. It provides them with a 360-degree view of all the previous and ongoing cases managed by them. Right from customer profiles and history of interactions to extensive dashboards, the Agent Console provides your service agents with a centralized platform with a plethora of resources.
Service Cloud Voice
This is an AI-based feature that converts telephony conversations into transcripts live. The feature can be used for analyzing the agents’ interactions with customers, providing them with adequate feedback, and training agents to improve their services.
Service Cloud Analytics
Salesforce Service Cloud helps users analyze their performance as they engage with customers and resolve their cases. The automated provides users with valuable insights about their performances and a snapshot of every case handled by them. This data can be used for reinforcing the techniques that work in providing seamless customer support getting rid of the ones that don’t work well.
How Much Does Salesforce Service Cloud Cost?
The cost of Salesforce Service Cloud depends on the edition you subscribe to. Based on the money you are willing to spend and the features you want to avail yourself of, you can choose one of the following four Service Cloud Editions.
Essentials ($25/user/month)
This is the most basic Salesforce Service Cloud edition designed for startups and small businesses. It can be implemented if you are looking for fundamental features of the solution.
This edition provides users with basic case management features, telephony integration, and access to service console applications. It also gives users exclusive access to Salesforce Knowledge to provide ideal support to their customers.
Professional ($75/user/month)
This Service Cloud edition is designed for SMEs that are willing to take the platform’s functionality a notch higher. Along with the features offered by Salesforce Essentials, the Professional edition provides users with service contracts and entitlements.
Enterprise ($150/user/month)
The Enterprise edition of Salesforce Service Cloud is ideal for medium and large enterprises looking for more advanced tools and functionality. Along with all the features offered by the previous two editions, the Enterprise edition provides users with web services API.
Unlimited ($300/user/month)
This is the last and the most expensive Salesforce Service Cloud edition designed for high-end enterprises. It provides users with advanced versions of all the features offered by all the editions discussed above. In addition to the same, it offers 24/7 support for resolving issues faced by organizations.
Key Benefits Of Implementing Salesforce Service Cloud
Seamless Communication
Communication plays the most important part when it comes to providing personalized support to your customers. Salesforce Service Cloud facilitates seamless communication across multiple, channels, including web, email, mobile, and social media. Irrespective of the medium through which your customers engage with you, you can provide them with the right support at the right time.
Better Agent Productivity
When your agents have all the information they need at their fingertips, they tend to feel more confident about their work and more engaged. Moreover, Salesforce Service Cloud facilitates process automation and workflow management in a way that reduces errors committed by your agents. This makes the service agents more productive, allowing them to resolve all their cases in the best way possible.
Personalized Support
Salesforce Service Cloud helps organizations steer away from providing conventional and generic support. Thanks to the CRM platform of Salesforce and Salesforce Knowledge, your service agents can extract all necessary information about the case at hand and tailor their support accordingly. Personalized support always makes customers feel special and allows you to build a healthy relationship with them.
Tracking The Cases
With the Service Cloud, agents can track all the cases handled by them to ensure that they are resolved on time. The cloud-based platform is designed to help users route the right cases to the right agent, removing all possible hurdles along the way.
The Use Of AI
Salesforce Einstein (the AI component of Salesforce) allows the platform to make smart decisions and assessments in the best interest of the users. Right from employing AI chatbots to provide the first level of support to providing service agents with personalized recommendations, the Service Cloud optimizes AI and machine learning to leverage your support processes. Moreover, these technologies allow the platform to grow as your service agents resolve more cases.
The Final Word
These were some of the most basic yet important aspects you should be aware of while implementing Salesforce Service Cloud in 2022. If you still haven’t jumped on the digital bandwagon, it is high time you start switching to cloud-based service desks and customer support platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud to thrive in the market.
