One of the strongest core areas of Salesforce is what is known as the “Service Cloud” — the part of the platform that supports customer service functions.The Service Cloud is used by companies like Chipotle to manage customer feedback on their burritos, and Activision to manage help desk support for players of the Call of Duty video game series.

The Service Cloud is also used by nonprofits and associations to manage constituent support for donors and members, power information helplines, and support other types of constituent services. It is also used within higher education to manage prospect and student services, intellectual property licensing requests, and more.

But what exactly is the Service Cloud? It is actually made up of a series of integrated features designed to improve the customer service experience for both your constituents and staff alike. Here is a quick run-down of the top 10 features:

1. Cases: Cases are the core record type of Service Cloud. They enable your staff to track all the key details around each service incident, as well as easily create business rules that route or escalate support requests based on your business processes.
2. Case Feed: Harnessing the collaboration power of Salesforce Chatter, the Case Feed gives your staff an intuitive, chronological view of all activity on a case and enables service teams to “follow”, “like”, and “comment” on cases as needed.
3. Email-to-case: Set up one or more special email addresses (like “[email protected]”) that route your constituents’ requests directly to Salesforce to automatically create a case and notify the right staff members.
4. Web-to-case: Similarly, set up Web forms that enable constituents to enter their information across various fields, which automatically create cases that can be more efficiently routed and serviced based on the information provided.
5. Telephone Integration: With Salesforce CTI, your phone agents will see Salesforce records display automatically on their screens based on the incoming caller and nature of the call. There is also click-to-dial for outbound calls. Saleforce integrates with lots of telephony providers and there many pre-built connectors available.
6. Live Agent: Want to let your constituents chat online with your customer support team? Live Agent offers provides the tools you’ll need to manage inbound chat activity.
7. Knowledge: Not only does Salesforce give you great tools for managing a knowledge base, it also provides a recommendation engine, presenting suggested articles to your staff based on keywords in the case. You can also make your knowledge base public on your Web site.
8. Service Cloud Console: For high-volume call centers, the Service Cloud Console provides an optimized user interface, letting your staff efficiently manage lots of activity at once across all the Service Cloud features.
9. Communities: With Salesforce Communities, you can provide self-service options to your constituents to not only log and track their own cases, but also to post questions and receive support from other constituents.
10. Marketing Cloud: Many of the questions or needs that your organization or school could address are being posted elsewhere across the public Web, on sites like Twitter. Using the social listening capabilities of Radian6, you can efficiently monitor millions of sources and turn those questions into cases that your staff can respond to.
11. Salesforce1: OK, so this top 10 list goes to 11. But no discussion of Salesforce today is complete without mentioning Salesforce1.  Salesforce1 means your customer service agents can quickly access customer and case data from their mobile devices, and your supervisors can likewise monitor escalations and service metrics from their tablet or smart phone.

When Saleforce Service Cloud is combined with other capabilities of Salesforce CRM within your organization or institution, it can contribute significantly toward helping you become more constituent-centric.

Want to know more about the Service Cloud? Contact ACF Solutions to speak to one of our nonprofit or higher education specialists.