Great customer service happens when great teams use the right digital tools. If you want to improve your brand image and customer retention, look no further than Service Cloud APIs from Salesforce. Its suite of ready-made and customisable APIs can help you build a loyal customer base with ease.
In this guide, we’ll outline how you can get started with Salesforce Service Cloud APIs to give your brand that all-important market edge. We’ll focus on two of the most powerful support features that Salesforce Service Cloud APIs offer: omni-channel integration and Einstein AI insights. Each helps to simplify your customer workload and grow your customer presence at the same time. After that, we’ll touch on the lifespan of APIs Salesforce supports so you can plan more effectively. Read on to learn more.
What Salesforce Service Cloud APIs can I use?
Omni-channel integration
Businesses need to be everywhere customers are; unfortunately, customers are fragmented across multiple channels, making customer service challenging. Service Cloud’s omni-channel integration helps businesses focus their support efforts by centralising customer enquiries on a single platform.
SOAP API is one of the key Service Cloud APIs you’ll need to get started. The SOAP API allows developers to create, retrieve, update and delete records, like leads and custom objects. Once you’ve laid the foundations of your data using SOAP API, you can create smart routing logic and ensure customer queries are sent to the most appropriate team.
Once objects have been created, you can use the Metadata API to control settings and metadata information easily. Doing so allows you to make changes to your system and data without having to perform full overhauls or manual corrections, saving you time and stress.
Finally, Service Cloud Voice has a number of useful APIs that can integrate with your phone system and aid agent productivity. For example, VoiceCall and Post-Call log telephone case information like start and end times, queue position and service agents, to help you analyse your team’s efficiency and workload.
Einstein integration
Service Cloud goes even further, enabling businesses to automate and streamline customer interactions and staff processes via Einstein AI.
Internally, Einstein AI can make real-time case handling recommendations to staff in the lightning console. Einstein offers advice on how to proceed with customer interactions by suggesting helpful next steps and reply templates.
Einstein AI analyses customer data before it even reaches your staff, so they’re always equipped with usable information and actionable insights. For example, Einstein Language comes with three APIs to analyse text and speech input:
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- Sentiment classifies language into positive or negative categories, helping to detect annoyed customers before they become angry ones.
- Intent identifies what customers are trying to accomplish, whether it’s asking a simple question or something more specialised.
- Named Entity Recognition helps decode messier text inputs and picks out important bits of information, like names, dates and locations, so you can cut to the chase quickly.
Together, Einstein Language analyses text and speech data to identify more pressing cases like complaints or time-sensitive enquiries. In turn, Einstein escalates cases ahead of others to ensure that your service staff can find quick resolutions.
Einstein Vision also includes three APIs that can handle whole images as well as objects and characters contained within images. Like Einstein Language, Einstein Vision examines image data and can help your staff identify individual products from large catalogues, or analyse documents sent during customer interactions.
Native and custom integrations
Service Cloud can handle native and custom API integrations across the entire Salesforce ecosystem.
For example, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud work together to give you a complete overview of your customers’ journeys and sales funnel interactions. You can manage leads, customer enquiries and post-purchase support on one central platform, and cultivate a welcoming customer dynamic that promotes repeat business.
You can also use Mulesoft to create custom APIs to bridge external data sources or legacy systems within your business. As a result, you can unify existing systems with the latest software and access cutting edge support features to survive in the modern marketplace.
How long do Salesforce Service Cloud APIs last?
All Salesforce Service Cloud APIs have a finite lifespan. So, how long can you expect a typical Service Cloud API to last?
Salesforce pledges to support API versions across all its services for at last three years from the date of first release. After this threshold, Salesforce may stop supporting some APIs, depending on their popularity or capabilities. As a result, more popular APIs may last longer than three years. However, Salesforce cannot guarantee indefinite support.
Don’t worry, though. If Salesforce plans to stop support for an API you use, you’ll receive at least one year’s notice, so you can start planning migrations and workarounds with new or custom solutions.
Integrate and automate with Service Cloud APIs from Salesforce
Service Cloud provides businesses with a versatile platform and a range of APIs to tackle the demands of modern customer service.
Service Cloud can add value across your entire business by enriching your customer service capacity and quality, and by giving your staff the tools to cope. The APIs we’ve outlined above will give you a strong footing to stand out in the market, and to present yourself as a responsive and welcoming customer-focused business.
Learn more about implementing seamless support tools using our dedicated guide, and launch pioneering customer service in your business today.
Discover Service Cloud best practices with our expert advice
makepositive is a Platinum Salesforce Partner with a team of Service Cloud experts. We can help you uncover the full potential of support staff and internal 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 ten weeks. We offer ready-made and scalable Service Cloud configurations that are fully customisable, allowing you to establish everything from core Service Cloud channels to fully automated workflows and AI-derived analyses.
Get in touch with us at [email protected] and learn where Service Cloud and other Salesforce solutions can take your business.
