What is Salesforce Service Cloud? A guide to It’s Products Capabilities and Pricing

Salesforce Service Cloud is an AI-powered customer service platform designed for businesses to revolutionize how they manage customer support. It centralizes case management, automates workflows, and provides omnichannel support across email, social media, chat, and messages. 

With tools like AI-powered chatbots, knowledge management systems, and self-service portals, it empowers agents to resolve issues faster while delivering more personalized services. 

With its wide range of tools and capabilities, businesses can streamline operations, and boost agent productivity, while elevating customer satisfaction. 

Salesforce Service Cloud Products

Service Cloud is a highly flexible customer support software designed to adapt to the unique needs of businesses. It works seamlessly with other platforms like Salesforce Sales Cloud (for sales automation and pipeline management). It offers a wide range of products tailored to meet the unique needs of customer service teams. Here’s a breakdown of key products:

Field Service (Previously Known as Field Service Lightning)

Field Service is Salesforce’s mobile-friendly and highly customizable hub for managing on-site support teams. It optimizes scheduling, improves first-time fix rates, and enhances customer satisfaction by equipping field technicians with the tools they need to succeed. 

Key Capabilities of Field Service

Work Order Management: It facilitates creating, assigning, and tracking work orders and empowers field service teams to stay agile by digitizing the entire work order lifecycle. 

Scheduling and Dispatching: With intelligent scheduling tools, organizations can optimize resource allocation based on skills, location, and availability.

Mobile App Extensibility: The Field Service mobile app equips field service teams with the required information, including work orders, customer data, and knowledge articles, even when offline. 

Asset Management: Field technicians can track the lifecycle of customer assets from installation to maintenance. They can gain insights into asset performance, schedule preventive maintenance, and minimize equipment downtime. 

Analytics and Reporting: Organizations can use pre-built analytics dashboards to gain valuable insights into field service team performance. It includes tracking KPIs such as first-time fix rates, average service time, technician utilization, asset availability, etc. 

Simply put, Field Service empowers agents to manage work orders digitally, ensuring seamless coordination across teams.

With intelligent scheduling, it optimizes resource allocation based on skills, location, and availability, while the mobile app provides offline access to customer data, work orders, and knowledge articles for on-the-go efficiency.

Digital Customer Engagement Platform

The Digital Customer Engagement Platform helps businesses connect their customers on their preferred channels across email, chat, social media, and messaging. It provides agents with a 360-degree view of customers, empowering them to deliver personalized, proactive, and connected service interaction. 

Key Capabilities of Digital Customer Engagement Platform

Omnichannel Customer Engagement: It allows businesses to connect with customers across multiple channels to provide personalized support. This feature complements Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enabling businesses to run personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels.

With chatbots, organizations can provide 24/7 support and automate answers to common customer questions.

Omni-Channel Routing: This feature intelligently routes customer interactions from any channel (chat, social media, and messaging) to a qualified agent based on skill set and availability, ensuring faster resolution. 

Visual Remote Assistant: This empowers agents to provide real-time support through video, screenshots, and annotations, enabling them to guide customers with a highly engaging approach.

Customer Service AI 

Customer Service AI involves various Salesforce AI products that leverage the power of artificial intelligence to transform customer service operations. 

Key Capabilities of Customer Service AI

Agentforce for Service: Businesses can set up Agentforce for Service quickly (in minutes) by using its out-of-the-box templates, existing Salesforce components, and instructions. 

Einstein Bots: AI-powered chatbots automate routine customer interactions, provide instant support, and free agents to handle more complex tasks. Einstein bots are self-service tools that can guide customers through processes, answer FAQs (frequently asked questions), and transfer cases to human agents when needed.

They learn from interactions and continuously improve accuracy and efficiency with time. It supports multiple languages and understands regional details (currency, dates, and number formatting. 

Einstein for Service: It is a collection of AI-powered features that enhance various aspects of agents’ workflow and provide intelligent tools to improve case management, knowledge access, and customer interactions.

With Case Classification, analyze past cases for categorization, automate data entry for new cases, and route them to the appropriate agent. It reduces agents’ handling time and helps resolve cases quickly and accurately. 

Contact Center

Salesforce Contact Center modernizes and unifies your customer communication hub. It provides a centralized platform for handling all voice and digital interactions, empowering agents to deliver consistent and efficient customer experiences. This solution aims to transform your contact center from a reactive call center to a proactive engagement center.

Key Capabilities of Contact Center

Unified Agent Workspace: Provide agents with a single, unified view of customer interactions across voice, chat, messaging, and other digital channels. 

Help Center: Build and launch a brand help center using clicks without coding. Businesses can help customers find answers by developing a strong knowledge base and embedded articles for the most common questions.

It enables organizations to create a customer community that turns customers into trusted advisors, so they can share common knowledge, and resolve common questions. 

Visual Remote Assistant

Salesforce Visual Remote Assistant provides real-time, visual support to customers remotely. It focuses on enabling agents to see what the customer sees, allowing for faster and more effective troubleshooting and problem resolution. This tool brings a visual layer to digital customer support, enhancing understanding and reducing frustration.

Key Capabilities of Visual Remote Assistant

Augmented Reality (AR): Agents can guide customers through complex issues by sharing visual instructions in real-time.

Video Stream and Screen Sharing: Enables agents and customers to connect via live video without downloading, allowing agents to diagnose issues that are difficult to explain in voice or text explanation. 

Customer Service Incident Management 

It empowers your service and operation team to work together, leading to quickly and effectively managing major service disruptions or incidents that impact a large number of customers. It centralizes incident response, streamlining communication, and ensuring rapid resolution to minimize downtime and customer frustration. This solution provides a structured approach to dealing with high-impact service interruptions.

Key Capabilities of Customer Service Incident Management

Event Monitoring: It enables businesses to monitor systems to pinpoint potential problems and take action before they become widespread.

It automatically creates an incident when a technical issue happens and immediately alerts the right team members to resolve issues quickly. It provides a unified view of the incident, affected customers, related cases, and resolution progress. 

Incident Swarming with Slack: Slack facilitates cross-team collaboration and helps you with out-of-the-box swarming flows to identify all related experts, bring them together, and create a channel. The team can access CRM data, analyze, and resolve incidents. 

Dashboards: With its pre-built dashboards, you can get a clear view of open incidents, and how your team is managing incidents to improve response strategy and operational efficiency. 

Customer Service Operations

It is designed to optimize operations, improve efficiency, and deliver better customer experiences. It provides operational visibility, data-driven insights, and automation tools to streamline operations. 

Key Capabilities of Customer Service Operations

Customer Experience Intelligence: With AI-powered sentiment analysis across service channels, businesses can get insights into customer satisfaction and churn by measuring what issues, products, and services lead to positive or negative experiences. 

Service Intelligence: Businesses can get a complete picture of service operations including trends (cases by channels, cases closed and escalated cases), productivity, and areas for improvement in one place. You can track average time-to-close (cases) and total escalated cases to track team performance and routing efficiency. 

My Service Journey: It provides a service capabilities navigator to help service leaders find the right features according to specific business objectives, the Service Cloud edition, and the service area, uncovering what to do next. 

Service Cloud Voice

By integrating telephony systems with Salesforce Service Cloud, businesses can transform their call centers into an intelligent, omnichannel hub that delivers quick, efficient, and more personalized customer service. This integration empowers agents with a unified workspace where they can manage calls with email, chat, social media, and other digital interactions. 

Key Capabilities 

Real-Time Call Transcriptions: Service agents can gain real-time call transcriptions and leverage AI-driven suggestions to drive the best next actions to resolve cases faster. 

Conversations Summaries: With AI-generated summaries, agents can gain work order or interaction summaries to boost productivity. Also, it provides prediction resolution of any issues at the end of summaries to resolve queries quickly. 

Omni Supervisor: Service leaders can get complete visibility into agent work status across channels. They can monitor agents’ calls and help them in real time with Slack or chat. The meaningful insights help you to set up training for specific teams to speed up their work efficiency. 

Service Cloud Slack 

With the Slack and Salesforce Service Cloud integration, agents can share information, escalate issues, and resolve cases faster without leaving the platform. 

Key Capabilities 

Increased Agent Productivity and Collaboration: Slack integration provides a centralized hub for agents for communication and knowledge sharing. The integration enables agents to access Salesforce data directly from Slack. It streamlines workflows by automating approvals directly from Slack. 

Streamline Incident Management: When dealing with major incidents, Slack channels provide a dedicated space for the incident response team to discuss the problem, assign tasks, share updates, and track progress. 

Employee Service Management 

This platform revolutionizes the way organizations interact with their employees, fostering a more connected, and productive work environment. 

Key Capabilities of Employee Service Management

Employee Portal: It is a centralized, self-service hub for employees to access HR policies and resources. HR departments can automate common service requests, such as updating bank account details and adding a beneficiary. It helps provide employees with an effortless self-service experience and an easy-to-use menu. 

HR Service Console: Enables HR teams with a unified workspace to manage employee requests, inquiries, and cases. HR service console enables automatically route cases to the right HR expert and seamlessly supports employees across any channel. It offers pre-built integration with Human Capital Management (HCM) systems, HRIS, and ERP tools, connecting payroll, benefits, and other critical HR platforms. 

AI for Employee Service: Businesses can leverage AI-powered chatbots to provide instant answers to employee questions and offer intelligent recommendations for knowledge articles.  

Feedback Management

It is designed for businesses to help them collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback across all touchpoints. Organizations can understand customer sentiments and identify areas for improvement by creating a feedback process. 

Customizable Survey: Streamline survey creation with Survey Builder’s AI-powered capabilities that help you create surveys customized to your audience, industry, and business goals. Businesses can get an instant survey summary to gain valuable insights for customer analysis. 

Reports and Dashboards: Gain immediate insights into customer sentiments and response rates to accelerate decision-making and service team productivity with pre-built reports and dashboards. 

Salesforce Service Cloud Pricing

Here are the Salesforce Service Cloud plans and editions cost breakdown. 

Starter Suite: Service Cloud cost starts from $25/user/month in the “Starter Suite” plan. It includes out-of-the-box sales processes, case management, and knowledge management features.  

Pro Suite: Starts from $100/user/month and includes everything in Starter Suite with added features of omni channel routing and service contracts. 

Enterprise Edition: Pricing starts from $165/user/month and includes all features of Pro Suite with Einstein for Service and Service Intelligence is available for purchase. 

Unlimited Edition: Pricing starts from $330/user/month and includes all features of Enterprise Edition with additional features such as Premier Success Plan and Einstein for Service available for purchase. 

Einstein 1 Service: Pricing starts from $500/user/month, including all features of Unlimited Edition along with Einstein for Service and Unified Voice & Messaging.

How Salesforce Service Cloud is Helping Businesses? Real-World Examples

Coca-Cola 

Coca-Cola leveraged Salesforce Service Cloud to optimize its delivery and maintenance operations. It helps them connect their disconnected systems, enabling service reps to instantly resolve issues.  

Overall, Coca-Cola’s technical service departments have seen a 30% increase in productivity. Their Service teams have gained instant access to customer history, log issues, generate work orders, and assign field technicians in the service mobile app, all this in real-time. 

Fisher & Paykel 

Fisher & Paykel is a premium appliance brand that sells across 50 countries. They faced challenges of disconnected data, which made it difficult to provide exceptional customer experience. 

With Service Cloud integration, Fisher & Paykel provided smarter and personalized support to customers around the globe. With Salesforce’s Self-service AI chatbots, they are now resolving 30% of online queries. The service team saves 3300 hours per month through automation and self-service. 

FairPrice Group

FairPrice Group was established in 2019 and has a network of over 570 touchpoints, providing grocery services, food takeaways, and a reward program. With the increasing volume of customer inquiries, their goal to deliver exceptional support is only possible with an integrated solution. 

By integrating Service Cloud Salesforce and Einstein Bots, FairPrice Group enables 24/7 customer support using generative AI. As a result, Chatbots now deflect 80% of cases, freeing up human agents for more complex customer queries and a 10% reduction in the cost per support ticket.

These examples showcase how Service Cloud can be tailored to meet the unique needs of any business, driving efficiency and customer loyalty.

Final Take

Salesforce Service Cloud can be a strategic investment to revolutionize customer service. By leveraging its AI-driven tools, omnichannel capabilities, and real-time insights, businesses can transform how they interact with customers, streamline operations, and drive growth.

Whether you’re looking to automate routine tasks, empower your agents, or deliver personalized support, Salesforce has the tools to help you succeed. If you want to leverage the full power of the Salesforce platform, Smart IT Staff offers pre-vetted Salesforce Developers with expertise across all Salesforce products who can work with your existing team.