What is Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for customer service and support. It could be one component of an overall Salesforce CRM package that would be an ideal CRM software solution (opens in new tab) for your business.

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Customer Service

Salesforce Service Cloud is designed to assist your business’s customer service team. Customer service agents can use it to increase efficiency in a variety of ways. Using automated workflows, they can reduce their workload by delegating common, repetitive tasks to Salesforce Service Cloud’s Einstein AI (opens in new tab). 

Salesforce Service Cloud further increases agent efficiency by aggregating all customer service inquiries across multiple communications channels—phone, chat, email, social media, etc.—into one set of tickets, which are then automatically pushed to the correct agent based on the priority of the ticket and that agent’s area of expertise. 

In addition to directly assisting agents, Salesforce Service Cloud gives access to an AI-assisted knowledge base that provides customers with self-guided assistance. This further reduces the workload of the customer service team so they can focus on priority cases only.

AI-powered analytics enable customer service managers to quickly and easily identify the strengths and weaknesses of their agents, assisting upper management in finding areas where coaching and improvement are required.

Sales

Salesforce Service Cloud also provides support for agents in the field. It enables customers and field agents to book remote appointments, saving transit time and increasing the speed of service. It also uses its AI-driven automation system to assign jobs to agents based on priority and specialty the same way that it assigns support tickets.

HR

Although it is primarily a customer service CRM, Salesforce Service Cloud can also be used to handle some HR functions. Broadly, the feature set is the same, but it is targeted towards internal employees instead of external customers. An employee ticket system intelligently assigns tickets to the correct HR representative based on priority and specialization while an employee self-service portal has the same AI assistant as the customer-facing portal.

Other employees

Finally, the employee side of Salesforce Service Cloud features the same multi-channel integration as the customer-facing side of the software, enabling employees to reach HR via phone, text message, email, online chat, your company’s internal communications app, or social media.

Automatic duplicate ticket merging

By aggregating all tickets into one easily navigable database and merging any duplicate tickets, Service Cloud enables customer service agents to avoid working on the same case twice. This increases efficiency and results in a smoother customer experience.

Integrated multi-channel service

Customers have a range of preferences when it comes to contacting your business. Service Cloud comes with a system that aggregates service requests from numerous communications channels into one ticketing system. Tickets are then automatically forwarded to agents based on each agent’s specialization and the priority status of the ticket.

This ensures convenient, rapid service for all of your customers regardless of their chosen communications channel.

AI-driven customer service

Service Cloud utilizes Salesforce’s Einstein AI to improve your customers’ experience. Einstein’s bots are equipped to handle routine customer service requests, basic customer authentication, and categorization of cases before handing them off to an agent. This frees up your agents’ time and helps increase efficiency.

Einstein can also analyze the patterns of customers using your self-service features to provide intelligent recommendations to those customers and streamline their self-service experience.

Advanced analytics

Service Cloud’s service analytics (opens in new tab) feature enables managers to input key performance indicators (KPIs) for service agents. It then provides reports that can be used to identify areas of excellence as well as areas for improvement among individual agents.

It can also predict possible product issues, customer issues, and churn risks by analyzing patterns within incoming service tickets.

These features enable management teams to proactively address issues with individual agents and within the entire business.

Cloud-based VoIP

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which is essential for most call centers, is complex and expensive to set up. Service Cloud Voice (opens in new tab) enables you to access ready-to-use VoIP infrastructure over the cloud through a partnership with Amazon Connect (opens in new tab).

This will not only save your business money but will also save your IT team a lot of time that they would otherwise spend setting up and maintaining this expensive and complex technology in-house.

Salesforce Service Cloud is priced on a pay-as-you-go basis with four tiers of pricing available, each with more features than the last. Pricing is quoted as per user/per month, billed annually, with the lowest-priced tier starting at $25 USD monthly and the most expensive tier starting at $300/month.

As with all Salesforce products, pricing is negotiable, and Service Cloud is fully customizable. Although features are grouped into four distinct tiers, customers can speak to their Salesforce agent upon purchase and request additional features or remove features from their existing package. Pricing will be adjusted accordingly.

At higher pricing tiers, Salesforce Service Cloud offers large-scale call center support and unlimited users, which makes it ideal for large enterprises that have the need and budget to support it. Its lower-end tiers are priced fairly, and the feature set should be sufficient for small business users.

The most frequently-asked questions about Salesforce Service Cloud.

Service Cloud is a product offered by Salesforce. Salesforce provides software solutions to businesses, and Service Cloud is its CRM solution for customer service teams. Since it’s part of the Salesforce suite, your team can enhance Service Cloud by downloading plugins from Salesforce AppExchange (opens in new tab) and train new team members on Service Cloud in Salesforce Trailhead (opens in new tab). You can also maintain one customer database across multiple Salesforce products such as Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Marketing Cloud (opens in new tab).

Purchasing a Service Cloud license will immediately grant your organization access to Salesforce Service Cloud. As long as you continue to pay for access, you and your team can continue to use Service Cloud for your customer service CRM needs. There are four different license types available for Service Cloud: Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. Which one you need will depend on your budget and what features you will require.

Salesforce offers two cloud services—Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Software as a service refers to providing access to software directly over the cloud. Salesforce has a broad range of SaaS services, including CRM software, business analytics software, and corporate social sustainability analytics. Due to this large ecosystem, Salesforce has a development environment called Platform. This PaaS product enables developers to develop native Salesforce applications directly through the cloud.

You can check if you have a Service Cloud license by navigating to the licenses section from your Salesforce dashboard. Log into Salesforce and navigate to Setup in the sidebar on the left. Then go to Company Settings > Company Information > Licenses. Once there, look at your list of licenses. If you have Service Cloud, it should appear with Active written in the Status column.

Service Cloud includes a broad range of features aimed at increasing the efficiency of customer service teams. Most notably, it provides a centralized ticketing system, a knowledge base for customer self-service, and performance analytics reports so customer service managers can quickly gauge agent performance. 

Service Cloud enables customers to communicate with agents by phone, text, chat, and email. Chat is available on both desktop and mobile applications.

To learn more about CRM software, check out our article What is CRM Software (opens in new tab). Afterward, check out How can CRM software help me improve customer relationships (opens in new tab) to learn more about the benefits of Customer Service CRMs like Service Cloud.