Transform Your Customer Service with Salesforce: Affordable and Efficient

If you are dealing with a stressed customer service, sales, and marketing operation, you can check out how Salesforce Service Cloud resolves these issues below!

Salesforce has long been known to offer outstanding software-as-a-service (SaaS) business apps like CRMs, ERPs, order management software, etc. 

Now, to make your business’s customer service and frontline operations more effective and affordable, it has developed and published the Salesforce Service Cloud app for small, medium, startup, and large businesses.

If you are unsure which modern customer service CRM will be appropriate for your business, keep reading until the end to explore Salesforce from the ground up. The decision-making will be a cakewalk.  

Why Does Your Business Need a Better Customer Service?

You must set up efficient, proactive, and customer-centric customer service operations to protect brand image, enhance brand image, and grow business revenue. Find below the major reasons to own an outstanding customer service team: 

• You can retain your customers easily by offering proactive, courteous, and professional customer service. It is easy to keep a customer for a longer period and earn revenue than acquire new customers.
• Your organization can contain any severe customer experience by showing empathy and proactiveness to help before the customer can reach out to any consumer protection tribunal.
• If your customer service team is attentive and caring, customers will easily invest more in your brand by buying new products or services. Most customers do not want the hassle of switching brands to avoid market research and headaches. Your customer service team can use this customer psychology to retain them.
• A customer service operation can generate useful data on public consumption trends, pricing expectation feedback, and feature improvement requests. The product research and development team can benefit from such insights to make your business’s products and services more useful.
• A rep working as a customer service agent can identify additional services or product needs of the customer during a live interaction and suggest the user buy add-ons from the company.

To satisfy all the reasons mentioned so far, you do not need to look further than the fast-growing, intuitive, low-learning curve and affordable CRM Salesforce Service Cloud.     

What Is Salesforce Service Cloud?

The Salesforce Service Cloud is the next-generation customer relationship management tool known as cloud CRM. 

It is a full-service, web-based, cost-effective CRM solution that handles customer ticketing, document management, file sharing, lead management, lead-to-customer workflow, AI assistance to agents, and much more.

Service Cloud functions as the single and centralized source of truth for many operations in your business, like selling, upselling, lead tracking, deal negotiation, product marketing, corporate communication, business app development, and many more. 

It is a truly hassle-free CRM solution with many built-in business use cases so that your employees do not need to swap between apps and waste productive hours.

Instead, you can deploy them to more customer touchpoints to convert leads, prospects, and bystanders to customers and earn more money for your business books. 

The app is available as a web app, so you can use it on any computer device like Windows PC, MacBook, iMac, etc. Moreover, there are native mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, so your business managers can run customer service operations from a smartphone or tablet.

Not to mention, most of the actual customer service tasks that the frontline agent does on a desktop CRM are also available on the Salesforce Service Cloud mobile app.     

Why Salesforce Service Cloud?

Find below how you can achieve the best customer service as well as sales and marketing operations by adopting the Salesforce Service Cloud app in a diversified or specialized business entity: 

#1. A Modern CRM Tool With Built-In Automation

As an experienced customer service operations supervisor, I’ve experienced that agents complain a lot about the user interface of most dated customer relationship management tools.

The features in a conventional CRM are not always as the name suggests. Hence, agents need to go through at least four weeks of training before you can send them to the operations floor to take calls, chat, or process emails.

On the contrary, the Service Cloud CRM is a modern and minimalistic app. Most UI elements are familiar to agents who have already used web apps like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. 

The modern and clutterless look helps the agents to focus on tickets and emails rather than navigating on the CRM.

Moreover, it comes with robotic process automation and Macros to automate various mundane and repetitive tasks.     

#2. Easy-to-Use Workflows

The Salesforce Flow Library consists of many workflows you can simply import, customize, and use to save time planning and to test a business workflow. 

Fully automated workflows that you can get in Salesforce are: 

• Service templates
• Commerce flows
• Financial services templates
• Life-sciences and healthcare
• Public sector and governance
• Media and communications
• Manufacturing flows

#3. AI-Based Functionalities

The built-in AI assistant will help agents and supervisors deliver the best customer service by getting suggestions in workflows and avoiding critical errors. 

#4. Efficiency In Services

Agents and frontline business executives can now deal more with the customers when the Service Cloud app is extremely user-friendly, possess its own AI, and offers advanced search options. 

#5. Cost-Effective and Affordable

The high-end Service Cloud subscriptions are cost-effective since they solve complex issues that dated CRMs can not. Contrarily, the basic subscription is highly affordable for small and startup businesses. 

#6. Salesforce Einstein

Einstein is a comprehensive CRM AI fit for any business model. It can help you process a ticket to completion, suggest knowledgebase resources, update tickets, and do more than just these. 

It is a modeling-ready, data-ready, and production-ready AI that sets up projects and gets the customer or marketing services process started in a few minutes. Moreover, AI can also efficiently handle processes like IT services, sales, customer services, and marketing.  

#7. Go Where Customers Dwell

Dated CRMs were able to only engage users via phone. But with Service Cloud from Salesforce, your customer service and marketing agents can communicate with your customers on their mobile app, via SMSs, through WhatsApp, on Messenger, and not to mention all popular social media channels. 

Also, the CRM lets you create basic troubleshooting step landing pages that your agents can send to your customers via deep links. 

#8. Faster Case Completion

Agents can close similar cases faster by using Macros. These are the very Macros that you see on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. You can allow your agents or supervisors to create macros when they need. 

#9. Salesforce Lightning

Its Lightning feature offers an intelligent assessment of leads so that marketing and sales agent do not waste time on unsuccessful lead-to-customer conversion cases. Also, your Salesforce development engineer can create useful apps with a few clicks using the app builder on Lightning.  

Features of Salesforce Service Cloud

Here are the popular features of Salesforce Service Cloud: 

#1. Case Management

The Case Management module helps you to create new customer issue tickets and organize cases by Number, Subject, Status, Date/Time Opened, Case Owner, etc.

A Case consists of data points like Case Details, Contact Details, Parent Contact/Account Cases, Case Feed, Case Details, communication logs, internal communications, and more. 

#2. Self-Service Portals

This feature empowers the customers to do many things, like book a ticket, pay bills, transfer assets, resolve app issues, and more. 

When users get stuck, the intelligent self-service API takes the user to a live support agent automatically. 

All these happen via one app: Salesforce Service Cloud!

#3. Field Service Management Software

This feature enables your frontline services team to become more agile and thus profitable by utilizing these functionalities: 

• Expert scheduling
• On-site tech support by connecting with the back end
• Increased fix-time and fix-rate with Einstein AI
• Manage work orders
• Manage frontline services using mobile CRMs

#4. Digital Channel

You can create AI-powered chatbots for digital channel interactions, post social media comments, reply to Twitter messages, and so on. 

#5. Visual Support

You can offer secured face-to-face support via video chats and reduce the cost of technical visits. This module includes image, document, video annotation, live pointer, etc. 

#6. Customer Service Analytics

Instead of creating call center reports manually, you can use Einstein AI to get reports on average call handling time, email response time, customer satisfaction score, service level achievement, and more.

The Einstein AI is also able to answer your complex business questions like the following:

• What happened wrong?
• What did the case go wrong?
• What could have happened?
• What to do now?  

#7. Omni-Channel Routing

This feature uses AI and previous contact histories to connect the users to the right agents who successfully handled similar cases in the past faster than other agents. 

Also, agents can use this module to discuss with higher tiers or transfer customers to supervisors or tier two specialists. 

#8. Telephony Integration

You can integrate your call center telephony system with the Salesforce Service Cloud app. The app will monitor and help agents log the calls flawlessly. 

Agents can receive calls directly on the Service Cloud app, and no need to use any dated telephone devices.

Salesforce Service Cloud Offerings

Find below a host of solutions that Service Cloud offers for any customer, marketing, and sales services teams: 

Managing Contact Centers

Manage call centers effectively with a 360° view of the operations floor. Service Cloud turns a call center into a customer engagement center.

Self-Service Portals

Create robots troubleshooting, product comparison, product modification, and knowledgebase portals for web browsers and mobile devices. Thus most tech-savvy customers will automatically find what they need through these self-service portals.

Smarter Services

Make customers happy and loyal by exploring and resolving emerging issues before these issues threaten your company’s reputation in public forums, social domains, and media.

Start Service Portals

Launch new customer service portals for new products faster than your competitors. 

Make Agents Happy

Service Cloud CRM makes troubleshooting tools, instructions, emails, and call center scripts handy so that employees make fewer mistakes and make customers happier.

In-App Troubleshooting and Services

You can also provide in-app services to millions of customers using the Snap-ins feature of Service Cloud. This mobile-based program efficiently integrates most Service Cloud features through an application programming interface (API). 

It works across platforms like iOS, Android, web browsers, etc. Agents can connect with users from remote places via video calls, audio calls, and live chats. They can also troubleshoot directly on the device securely with customers.      

Salesforce Service Cloud Pricing

The Salesforce CRM Service Cloud is available in four price tiers, as mentioned below: 

• Essentials, the all-in-one support and sales app, costs $25 /user/month with annual billing
• Professional or the complete CRM for any team size will cost you $75 /user/month and will be billed annually
• Enterprise or the customizable CRM that offers comprehensive services is for $150 /user/month/billed annually 
• Unlimited, for restriction-free CRM power, you need to shell out $300/user/month and pay annually

You can further make Service Cloud CRM more powerful and capable of dealing with complex issues by getting these add-ons: 

• Field Service Lightning for $50 /user/month/billed annually, suitable for mobile CRM operations in urban or rural areas.
• Digital Engagement enables you to reach your customer anywhere, like mobile apps, social media, YouTube, and websites, for $75 /user/month with annual billing.
• Service Cloud Einstein is an AI-based customer service assistant and analytics specialist available for $50 /user/month with an annual billing commitment.

Final Words

So far, you’ve gone through the ultimate coverage on the business CRM apps Salesforce Service Cloud. You should have discovered all of its major features that align with the must-have features for any successful and customer-centric customer service operations.

Try out the Salesforce Service Cloud software on the web from the Salesforce demo portal. You will get unrestricted access to the Salesforce Service Cloud Essentials app for 14 days without submitting any credit card details.

Take the software for a spin by adding a small project, creating some customer cases, and selling products or services to real customers to find out how robust this cloud CRM is.