Having the right information in front of the right person at the right time is critical in providing customer support. Customers expect to have most of their questions answered instantly and increasingly get frustrated if an answer is not available within minutes. Being able to provide this information to your customers in real time used to be a hallmark of superior customer service, but now is expected as standard customer service.

Salesforce has several options available to you to ensure that you’re keeping every customer satisfied.

Functions in the Sales Cloud®

If you’re currently using or are implementing salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud®, you have the foundation necessary to capture and resolve customer questions or issues.  The basic functionality includes:

• Cases—you can track customer inquiries, escalate issues requiring specialized support and monitor your agent’s productivity.
• Solutions—Equip your customer service team with the answers to your customer’s questions and even make the answers available to the customers on the web so that they can find the answers themselves whenever they need them.
• Web-to-Case—if your customers can’t find what they’re looking for on the web, you can have them log a case directly from your website that immediately enters Salesforce.com for agent resolution.

Additional Functionality in the Service Cloud®

If you have a more complex support requirements or more active customer service team, you should consider Service Cloud® licenses.  Service Cloud licenses provides the standard Sales Cloud functionality for your users, and add additional functionality to better equip your team to provide service more efficiently.  You can have Sales Cloud and Service Cloud users in the same instance of Salesforce.com.  Additional features of Service Cloud include:

• Agent Console & Customizable Layouts—This helps your agents access relevant information about the customer with fewer clicks.  You can design the console to maximize this efficiency.
• Entitlement Management—if you have Service Level Agreements that provide different levels of support for your customers, you can use entitlement management to ensure that you deliver the proper service level including first response and resolution times. You can also incorporate automated processes that provide instructions for reps on the best way to resolve cases.
• Access to Live Agent Web Chat (additional fee above Service Cloud license)—Incorporate live chat from the web to ensure that your clients get answers from you in real time without a phone call

Below is a comparison of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud functionality:

Additional Functionality Available with Sales Cloud OR Service Cloud

There are two additional features that you can use to help your organization provide superior customer service.  Both of these are available for users of Sales Cloud or Service cloud when you purchase incremental feature licenses:

• Knowledge Base (additional fee)—This provides the same basic functionality as Solutions—but allows greater flexibility in ensuring the most relevant articles are delivered to customers—whether through your self-service portal, emailed by an agent, or discussed over the phone.
• Service Cloud Customer Community (additional fee)-- your customers can get service from the web 24 hours a day. They can get case updates and search your knowledge base, all without involving a customer service agent. You can also incorporate Ideas and Answers to allow your customers to suggest improvements and to interact with each other.

Granting Access to Service Cloud or Knowledge Users

If you’ve purchased any of the additional Customer Service features such as Service Cloud, Knowledge or Live Agent, you’ll have additional options on your User records.  Since these licenses are user-specific, you must identify the users who have access to the functionality.  There may be additional setup required to fully equip your users with the tools.  The addition options will appear on the User record and will look similar to this:

Desk.com

Prior to March 2018, Salesforce offered Desk.com for small, agile businesses, which is designed for multi-channel case management including Facebook and Twitter, live chat, and a self-service portal that you can customize with your branding. Desk.com has been moved to end-of-live and Salesforce clients will need to migrate to Service Cloud Lightning.

Getting Started

To take full advantage of the Customer Service functionalities of Salesforce.com requires set up and configuration.  If you have questions or need help with this configuration, please contact akaCRM.