Salesforce Service Cloud Reviews

We use Salesforce Service Cloud for CRM.

The most valuable feature of Salesforce Service Cloud is its ease of use.

Salesforce Service Cloud's report functionality could be improved.

I have been using Salesforce Service Cloud for ten years.

I rate Salesforce Service Cloud a seven out of ten for stability.

About 2,000 users, including salespeople, operations, and executives, are using Salesforce Service Cloud in our organization daily.

I rate Salesforce Service Cloud ten out of ten for scalability.

I previously used Oracle Sales Cloud.

I rate Salesforce Service Cloud an eight out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

We implemented Salesforce Service Cloud through an in-house team.

I am using the latest version of Salesforce Service Cloud.

Salesforce Service Cloud is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I would recommend Salesforce Service Cloud to other users.

Overall, I rate Salesforce Service Cloud an eight out of ten.

I have used it several times for past employers and clients. The most recent was a medical device firm that needed to document issues reported by customers regarding the use of their products.

It's all cases the solution was the first of its kind in the environment (it was previously manual). To be fair, just about any system would make an improvement in that situation.   What made SFDC particularly useful was the ease in setup and the ability to quickly refine it.

The most valuable feature was the ability to quickly add customizable fields (and by quickly, I mean in less than two minutes) that were easily incorporated into the existing framework.   

The system was remarkably easy to understand which made the setup quick. This is important because it gave us the ability to get started quickly.

While there is extensive reporting in the system, there is not always a direct route to get what you are looking for. There are plenty of tools in the market that provide those capabilities. I would just prefer it if there were an SFDC option.

I have used many different solutions, but I have not switched to SFDC from them (this is not a knock on SFDC, but more of a situation where the other systems did their jobs).

The answer to this question will vary greatly depending on the firm's requirements and available resources. For example, will out-of-the-box SFDC work? Do you require additional apps or is there a plan to customize? The best advice I can give you is to spend time upfront to nail down short and longer-term needs.

The most recent two were a choice between native ERP (Epicor) functionality and SFDC. These were the only two reasonable options because built-in compatibility with the ERP was a condition.

When looking at SDFC, take a look at the whole ecosystem.

• Contact tracking
• Knowledge Base
• Analytics

Through the use of the Knowledge Base, which we translated into 13 languages, we where able to increase our support reach to our customers. This included an increased support level not only for those customers whom we served directly via other channels (phone, email, and chat), but this also extended our reach to those customers whom we could not support directly (those who spoke Japanese, Korean and Russian, for example).

The treatment of email processing in the Service Cloud is still reminiscent of email processes appropriate to sales. There is a lack of flexibility to process an email (not web-to-case contacts) as a contact. This might take an entire rewrite of the approach or a purchase and integration of one of the competing email processing apps (which will go un-named, but you know who I mean).

Having said that, Salesforce is always improving, I am constantly amazed at the way they listen to their customers and (eventually) move innovations suggested by the field into their products.

I've been using it since 2006.

We had no problems with any of these phases of the project. Design and deployment took six months.

I can’t remember a time we were down unexpectedly.

We scaled up from five contact centers to 14, and added support features like chat and more translations of the Knowledge Base with ease.

I would rate the support received from Salesforce of the highest caliber. They are very responsive and helpful. They even sent a Product Director on-site to work with us on a particularly difficult issue.

The CRM product we used was not integrated across sales, marketing or support departments, nor was it integrated across borders (Europe and the US used separate instances). Just before the transition to Salesforce, that previous company reduced support to pay only and that was the final straw for us.

With the help of Salesforce Professional Services, our design, development, training and deployment took six months from the decision to implement to a final training day across nine cities worldwide. Salesforce has a very effective methodology for this process and is willing to help as much or as little as needed.

We used a Salesforce Professional Services team and had both an internal and a contract Project Manager. One huge advantage is that we had an overall business process owner who acted as a go-between, communicating with all of the teams Salesforce, sales, marketing, support, IT, finance and corporate management.

Our ROI figures are proprietary. What I can say is that the biggest ROI value comes from the intangible benefits (which the financial people have to figure in the spreadsheet). One factor was the ability to reach customers whom we could not directly support (see the discussion of the Knowledge Base above). Another was having a single source of truth for Customer Data, used by all departments, sales, support and marketing. The ability to identify product problems early and quickly by analyzing our contact data meant that we solved any product problems rapidly before those problems affected sales volume. Agent productivity and satisfaction also increased. The agents had direct input to the design and any enhancements to the system. We used a process of continuous improvement with regular updates. They “owned” the system and were happier and more productive as a result.

Appoint a business process owner who will “own” the implementation. This person needs to be totally invested in the success of the application, not only in their own department, but across all departments that will be using, or be affected by, the system. This includes IT and finance. Involve the users of the system in the initial design. They are the ones that will have to use the tool, and they know best what is easy and what is hard to do. When you incorporate their design suggestions, give them public credit, “Ed, this is the feature you suggested”. That gives them pride of ownership and may turn detractors into advocates for the system. Become very friendly with your IT Director. As a team you will be able to figure out the best upgrade and expansion strategy, cost saving strategy, and bug fix/feature enhancement process. You will also have an ally with whom you can present your cost justifications and enhancement requests to management.

• UI
• Easy to build
• Standard features
• Ability to customize

• Collaboration using Chatter
• Reporting using Wave Analytics
• Call center
• Case Feed
• Console

Avoid customizations as much as possible.

I've used it for over four years.

No, it's very easy especially if Standard functionality is used.

They're very good.

Initial set up was done using Standard features and hence it was very simple.

We did it in-house.

There are several good features, but the most valuable to us are the integrated email, entitlements, and the overall powerfulness of the platform.

• I would like better tracking of cases with SLA overdue (including "soon overdue").
• Emailing from the product has its limitations.
• In the web view, the editing window is too narrow, and it's difficult for complex cases with many details (logs, etc.), so I would like to adjust the middle column size. See below:

• No ability to paste pictures from clipboard.
• Adding in-line comments is not easy.
• I would like them to add a button such as "Send email and mark case as pending customer info".
• No embedded management of out of office auto-replies.

I've used it for one year.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with scaling it.

8/10

8/10

The complexity of the setup was in-between. There was some complexity.

It was done mostly in-house.

You should use a vendor for best practices and to stay in the spirit of Salesforce, as opposed to distorting the product.

The OOTB skills functionality is the most valuable feature for us.

It has streamlined workforce management, scheduling, etc. for the company's current business case. More specifically, I can only speak for my clients, but their call centers have dramatically improved from their legacy system to the new Service Cloud console. I know in the past year, we've seen substantial ROI in major healthcare companies.

The workforce management could use improvement as my client wasn't happy with the scheduling engine. The workforce management, particularly a third-party vendor, we didn't have much success with. They had never done an integration with Salesforce and we we're working specifically with another third party just to implement their field services organization.

I've used it on my current project for three months.

Deployment was not an issue. The product wasn't the issue, it was more so the implementation as a whole.

There were no issues with the stability.

There has been no issues with the scalability.

The issues, as with every implementation, is the change in the nature of the beast. We have clients that have been on a legacy system for 10-15 years and they are not ready for change. They also think their system is the most efficient "machine" on the market. So the change in culture has to be the most substantial bottleneck. Then you are in the growing pains stage, where your client absorbs this system, but they decide to take automation to a whole new level, like automatically fax from a computer with WiFi. The asks are endless, which is understandable because at this point, they appreciate the system, but they don't understand the limits. 

I would say that Omni Channel, which was launched with the Spring ’15 release, is the most valuable feature for me. It’s a way of distributing workload coming in from different channels, cases, leads, chats, and calls.

First of all, it distributes them, saving our end-users on several clicks and searches to get a new record to work on. It’s great for departments used to working with queues and as an administrator, you can also leverage the power of Omni Channel to eliminate the picking of easy work records.

As you may or may not know, when you have cases waiting in a queue, end-users have to accept the records one-by-one to work on them and, sadly, there are users who look at some details first to determine if it’s going to be an easy case or a complex case before taking them out of the queue, leaving the difficult case which take a lot of time to resolve in the queue.

Distributing them automatically and evenly between users through Omni Channel ensures that everybody performs at their best and improves their productivity!

Because we can give a specific weight on records like cases or leads, we can ensure that every end-user receives an even amount of work to digest per day. You can even assign skills to your users so that nobody receives something they would not be able to solve because they are too new to our company or because they just haven’t learned about a product or service yet.

Another skill you could add is language. As we are an international company, our customers can reach us in three languages (Dutch, French and German), so making sure that customer questions are routed to a user with the correct language skill automatically eliminates endless dispatching from user to another user because they don't know the language.

It would be nice if there were several components to download from the app-exchange, like building blocks that we would just plug into the console. As previously stated, the out-of-the-box console looks nice and has some powerful standard functionality, but is nothing like you see in demos. It would be great If there was a package containing some custom console components to put in the sidebars or to tweak it more easily.

To give a simple example: the standard related lists components that you put in the sidebar contain a first column called action with an edit/delete link. In a sidebar, this takes up a lot of valuable space and for me. Those links were not necessary in the sidebar, so I would have liked to be able to disable those or something (but not by taking the edit/delete rights away of the user profile). So we had to build some Visualforce custom component to replicate the exact same functionality but without that first column.

It seems something small, but one of the great powers of the Service Cloud console is to have a lot of information in one screen, so screen space is valuable.

We started implementing the Salesforce Service Cloud and Console for our telesales department about six months ago because we needed a way to streamline the workload for outbound calling and handling incoming web requests and wanted to also implement the Salesforce Live Agent on our webshop. Since Salesforce just launched Omni Channel, we decided this would be a great way to do all these things.

Not really, as it’s really easy to follow the implementation guide and watch some tutorials to get it up in running on your sandbox and it’s really flexible so you can model the console to your needs (although you’ll need a developer to create some custom components to get it just the way you want it).

There were no stability issues.

There have been no issues scaling it.

If you’ve worked with Salesforce products for a couple of years, as I have, you just know that Salesforce provides top-notch customer service! They want to be the best and as a customer you can feel that.

On top of lots of helpful resources like workbooks, implementation guides and instructional videos, you also have access to Salesforce Success Community. It’s full of peers and has groups focused on specific features and products like the Service Cloud. I would recommend to everybody when implementing a new feature and is getting stuck on something to post his/her question in the Success Community. It’s most likely somebody had that same question or problem before and the community is so active that you are likely to be getting an answer to your problem within a few minutes/hours.

If that fails, you can always submit a case with Salesforce support and grant them access to your organization so they can help you in a timely fashion.

All our users have had a Sales Cloud license and we already worked with queues, but converting the Sales Cloud license to a Service Cloud license for that specific department so that we could integrate Omni Channel and Live Agent was a good choice.

The biggest driver to do the switch was because of the fact we used another Chat provider on our website and the business came with the requirement to implement the chat transcripts in Salesforce. We had two choices: create an integration with Salesforce (which would have required some developers and custom development), or replace the chat function to Live Agent which is automatically integrated in Salesforce and the Service Cloud. It would eliminate the cost of an extra provider, save us money on custom development for integration, and has much more flexibility and scalability towards the future.

The choice was easily made.

I would say that for a beginning administrator it could seem somewhat complex, but there are a lot of resources to help you with initial setup, like the implementation guide and the Service Cloud workbook. Of course everything about every feature in Salesforce is described in great detail on their help and training portal.

For a more experienced administrator, it’s pretty straightforward, although working with custom components can seem overwhelming. You’ll need some programmatic knowledge to get the look and feel just the way you want. Certainly now you’ll need the Lightning Design System to make you Visualforce Components look like native components in the console.

But, hey, that’s why we love working with Salesforce I guess. It would get a bit boring for an administrator if you already knew everything and had nothing new to learn, isn’t it? ;-)

With Salesforce you never stop learning. There is always some new feature or functionality that provides a solution to your use case that you didn’t know about.

We planned and designed the functionality we needed ourselves. We also did most of the configuration and implementation ourselves, but we worked with a consulting partner to create some customized components for the console and to modify the Live Agent Customer Facing chat window style.

I can’t talk a lot about pricing because that depends on your contract negotiation with Salesforce, number of licenses/users you have, and what features your organization uses.

But in our case the price of a Service Cloud license wasn't a lot different as the Sales Cloud license, and as all our users had a Salesforce Sales Cloud license we just swapped some licenses for a Service Cloud license. But by doing that, we eliminated the extra cost and need of a secondary provider for the live chat function, we could use the Omni Channel feature to automatically manage and distribute the workload saving our agents time and making them more productive.

I would say it was well worth the change!

We are still in the beginning of using some of the features provided through the Salesforce Service Cloud. But from what I can see and the ease and speed with which we have implemented the features that we are using at this time, I guess it loses a point because the demos we see on world tours have a lot of customization in them and are not at all out-of-the-box. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really nice product with lots of out-of-the-box functionality, but to create a console like you see in demos you have to customize lots of stuff too.

Before you begin to sit down with your users to see how they work today, determine which information they consult from other records because when developing the Console View this is where you can make a difference! Creating some custom components with just that information from other records that they would normally click through links to get is the information you’ll want to create a component for. They will have all that information on the same screen when opening a record and they will save time not having to click and navigate to get the info. Creating an optimal view for your users is where one of the powers of the Service Cloud lays!

Consider investing in a consulting firm to create some custom components to get this done if you don’t have the in-house expertise. It’s really worth it. When using Omni Channel, think about the different skills you would create and give your agents so you can distribute the workload correctly.

There are several valuable features:

• Case assignment rules allow for auto assignment of cases as they are received.
• Email-to-Case allows me to set an email address to receive cases. I distribute that to my customers and they create cases for me when they email that address. I don’t have to keep up with cases within my inbox.
• Queues allow cases to be sent to a queue, which has multiple members. They each are notified of a new case and can take ownership as necessary.

Our support team are aware of the outstanding issues that need to be addressed in terms of open cases. Statuses allow us to organize them in a meaningful way. Reports and Dashboards allow management to follow support KPIs, such as number of cases closed vs. received, age of open cases, count of cases assigned to each rep, etc.

They could improve upon analytics. The reporting function is extremely user-friendly and powerful. I can get the reports that I need 99% of the time, but it is not a robust BI tool.

I've used Service Cloud since 2009 as first a customer and then as an implementation consultant. I have implemented it in various companies with multiple verticals.

We've had no issues deploying it.

The stability is unmatched.

The scalability is unmatched.

Customer service is great.

Technical support is great. Opt for the higher “Premium Support” to open up support channels like Chat with support as well as training videos on demand.

It is what you make it. I have implemented it with a simple configuration without many rules around who can do what in what status and when people should be notified of happenings.

I have implemented it with more complex business rules that required a bit more configuration. The product is set up to allow for both as well as scalability from a simple to complex set up as the organization needs it to grow.

We implemented it through a vendor because of a lack of in-house knowledge at the time. I have since been an implementation consultant who has seen initial in-house implementations. Salesforce is so admin friendly that the temptation to try it out alone is strong. I know that budget can be a concern but I would advise to use a vendor who knows the product.

In most cases, it takes more effort (and money) to fix what in-house novices have put in place than it would have been to set it up right the first time. If the in-house crew has a good technical aptitude, they can usually carry on from there. Just get the foundation right to ensure user adoption and scalability.

Purchase a license for any and all users. Sharing a login hinders usability and visibility of who did what and when. Some third-party vendors can get reports to non-users, but anyone who needs to do anything in the system needs to have their own license.

We did evaluate Microsoft CRM, but you get what you pay for there. We needed the flexibility and dependability of the Salesforce product.

I love this product. I believe it is the best in the industry and is only getting better. Use an implementation partner for initial setup and get the foundation right before trying to venture out on your own. Assign an individual(s) as the system admins and use the implementation as a training ground for them. Make sure they understand the configuration put in place by the vendor so that they can maintain going forward and possibly manage tweaks on their own. Technical aptitude is a must when choosing those admins.