Service Cloud can help your team provide attentive customer support 24/7, even out of hours. Salesforce hosts your data in the cloud, so it’s available anywhere in the world, which can revolutionise your customer support — but only if you know how to set up Service Cloud effectively.
In this guide, we’ll walk through how to set up Salesforce Service Cloud in five steps using best practices. Access the latest customer service tools and launch automated solutions in your organisation today. Read on to find out more.
How to set up Salesforce Service Cloud?
Step 1: Import your data to Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud is a piece of software — and like any other, depends on properly formatted and organised data. That’s why the very first step of our Salesforce Service Cloud set-up guide is preparing and importing your data.
First, choose your import method. You can use either the Data Import Wizard or the Data Loader tool (the latter being the better option for larger batches of files). Secondly, prepare your data for import. Remember to use Salesforce best practices, like:
- Consistent naming formats on files and objects
- Importing a test batch of data
- Avoiding duplicate records
If you’re using Salesforce Lightning Experience, the Service Setup Assistant can help you automate the data import process.
Step 2: Set up routing logic
Once your data is ready, you’ll need to tell Service Cloud how to use it. That’s why our second Salesforce Service Cloud setup recommendation is establishing routing logic for customer cases. Your routing logic is a vital step in setting up Service Cloud, as it will determine the workload of your support staff.
You’ll need to create an omni-channel strategy to determine how different cases are handled across each of your support channels, and how to manage your service queue. Consider key questions like:
- Do complaints always take priority over enquiries?
- Who should be available to answer niche questions across each of your departments?
- Are phone call cases higher priority than social media cases?
Make sure to measure service KPIs — like resolution time and customer satisfaction — throughout, and ensure that your routing logic is effective. These measures can indicate where your team faces bottlenecks and how you can make improvements later on down the line.
Step 3: Customise your console
The Service Cloud Lightning Console is completely customisable. You can add, remove and revamp your service dashboard and make important components easily accessible to your support team.
Taking time to make small adjustments can be an easy way to improve productivity. For example, if staff have to navigate through numerous sub-menus and folders for a particular service option, add a shortcut to the console dashboard.
Step 4: Automate your workflows
One of the most important steps in our Salesforce Service Cloud setup guide (second only to step five) is finding ways to simplify your workload. Fortunately, Service Cloud can easily automate tasks and free up time and talent within your organisation.
Tools like Flows and Marcos help your staff complete repetitive tasks by generating templates, populating data fields and executing whole processes at the touch of a button. On the customer end, Auto-Response helps address common enquiries by triggering pre-programmed replies and links to Knowledge base content.
Once implemented, your automated tools can reduce your service team’s workload, allowing them to spend more time on complex customer needs. The same tools can also help you offer support to customers when staff aren’t around, or when they’re busy with other cases.
Step 5: Leverage Einstein AI to work smarter
The true power of Service Cloud comes when you pair it with Einstein AI. Accordingly, this is the most important step in our Salesforce Service Cloud set-up guide. Einstein AI integrates across Service Cloud, helping you keep pace with changing customer needs.
Einstein offers key functionality across areas such as:
-
- Case management: Einstein uses natural language processing to analyse cases waiting in your customer service queue, and it automatically intervenes to escalate more pressing issues to staff for faster resolutions.
- Service Standards: Einstein offers just-in-time support to help your service staff identify the nature of customer cases and suggest effective next steps. Einstein can also help you plan staff rotas by predicting busier periods so you’re always ready for customers.
- Omni-Channel routing: Einstein analyses your routing logic and suggests new, more efficient ways to categorise cases and manage them.
By leveraging Einstein AI, you can expand and simplify your workload simultaneously, access hidden customer insights, and ensure your service team is equipped for any challenge.
Deliver unbeatable customer support with Salesforce Service Cloud
Service Cloud offers businesses an integrated platform of innovative tools to resolve customer issues faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Pre or post-purchase, Service Cloud is the perfect solution for businesses looking to provide additional value to their customers. Use the steps above to set up Salesforce Service Cloud in your own organisation and start delivering unbeatable customer service at every stage of your entire sales funnel today.
Implement Service Cloud best practices with an expert Salesforce Partner
makepositive is a Platinum Salesforce Partner with a team of Service Cloud experts. We can help you unleash the full potential of customer support staff and workflows using our Service Cloud Accelerator programme.
Our Accelerator programme is an end-to-end implementation solution that can reduce your Service Cloud lead time to just 10 weeks. We offer ready-made Service Cloud configurations that are scalable and fully customisable, so that you can establish core Service Cloud channels, fully automated workflows and AI-derived insights.
Get in touch with us at [email protected] and learn where Service Cloud and other Salesforce solutions can take your business.
