Being a part of the Service & Support ecosystem, I have had the chance to watch the Service Cloud product grow from its infancy to a whole new level of maturity and feature offerings over the last few years. Service Cloud has gone from playing catch up with other support platforms in the industry to becoming a leader and trend-setter in its own right.
Whether you’re a veteran in the space or are just looking at Service Cloud for the first time, let’s take a few minutes to look at just how much Service Cloud has grown and expanded its feature offerings.
Call Center
Then: Limited CTI integration and minimal options for building a useful agent console
Now: Social Contact Center allows monitoring/tracking across an unprecedented level of channels (social, chat, web, email, and of course phone), Service Cloud Console can show data from other systems or custom UI elements to maximize agent efficiency and usability
Self Help
Then: Self Service Portal could be embedded in a website, plain text “Solutions” were the only option for exposing knowledge
Now: Custom Portal and Siteforce can be leveraged to build pixel perfect UI for customers, new products like Chatter Answers leverage the power of customer communities, and last but not least, Salesforce Knowledge is now KCS certified!
Social Media
Then: Social Media? Who? What?
Now: Out of the box features like Social Contacts provide useful info to agents right in the console. Powerful monitoring tools like the free Salesforce for Twitter/Facebook app or Radian6 give companies deep insight into brand sentiment and the tools to respond to customers.
If you’re like me, all of these new features make you feel like a kid in a candy shop, but it can be a real challenge to stay informed about what these features actually do and which ones you may be able to leverage for your support organization. We live and breathe Service Cloud here at Perficient so please feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, thoughts you may have.
