Salesforce claims you can set up customer service in Service Cloud update in less than a day

Salesforce announced an update to its Service Cloud today, which the company says enables non-technical administrators to build a customer service organization with connected services in less than a day.

That’s a bold claim, even for the marketing department, but the Service Cloud app builder has been built on top of the Salesforce Lightning development platform and designed to drag and drop components from Salesforce and third parties into the Service Cloud app building interface. This should allow users to add components like Facebook, email or Twitter integration with a proverbial “few clicks.”

There will be 75 integration components available in the Salesforce AppExchange at launch, according to the company. Some examples include Dialpad, which lets a rep make a call from inside the customer record; MapAnything Live, which lets reps follow delivery and service vehicles on a map in real time; and Healthwise, which lets a consultant connect a patient to relevant health education materials.

Keith Pearce, VP of marketing for Service Cloud at Salesforce, says the new approach has been designed to allow administrators to add these functions without coding or help from IT. He acknowledges that if a component isn’t available, it could take more than a day, and perhaps some IT help to build more customized components.

Pearce says that younger employees don’t want to be using their parents’ customer service platform. They want a clean modern experience and the new Service Cloud is designed to show them the onslaught of customer requests in a more organized way.

 

Customer Rep’s Cases view. Photo: Salesforce

 

Other new features include federated search to find information faster, a macro builder for building macros for common customer service tasks, and what they call a 360 degree view of the customer, to see all of the previous interactions with this customer in one place. For instance, it could show that the person on the line called about this problem several times before, which could explain why they are being so hostile.

Finally, if your employees are workaholics or they are working in the field, they can access customer information from the convenience of their smartphones, to check on the status of their customer’s requests.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Salesforce announcement without Trailhead training components, so people can learn how to use these tools more effectively.

If companies are able to truly streamline their customer service offering as quickly as advertised, while offering a more modern experience for customers and reps, Salesforce will be onto something. But as always, the proof of the pudding is going to be in the tasting.