Knowledge Management Is Strong; Analytics Are Weak
We’ve just done an in-depth evaluation of the customer service capabilities in Salesforce Winter ’13, the latest release of the CRM suite from Salesforce.com. These capabilities include account management, case management, knowledge management, process management, internal communities, and social network management. They comprise the broadest and deepest customer service offering that we’ve seen from any single supplier.
Service Cloud is the Salesforce CRM application that provides the case management capabilities and serves as the anchor. A collection of tightly integrated, but variously packaged and priced features and additional applications provide the rest of the customer service functionality. All of the apps and features run on the Salesforce CRM platform, which provides a very large set of common, shared services, data, and tools.
- Change management facilities in Salesforce Knowledge have become comparable to those in full-featured, general purpose content management systems. The product has automatic versioning of knowledge items and facilities for publishing, reverting, and deleting knowledge item versions.
- Knowledge capture facilities let contact center agents and social network users contribute items to the knowledgebase. These items come in as drafts. Knowledge staff validates and publishes them. The new Article Validation attribute of knowledge items is the change management mechanism for ensuring that agent-contributed and customer-contributed content is correct and compliant.
- Knowledge management is tightly integrated with case management. As agents enter text into case fields, the Autosuggest feature automatically searches the knowledgebase using the terms in those case fields as search queries and presents as search results a list of knowledge items that may resolve the case even before it’s created.
On the other hand, analytic functionality (instrumentation and reporting) was the most surprising limitation. Granted, the Analytics component of Salesforce CRM has excellent easy-to-learn and easy-to-use reporting tools. And it does package a huge set of predefined reports. But it’s quite difficult to analyze and to refine the performance, efficiency, and effectiveness of deployed customer service capabilities.
Why? Two reasons:
- Most significantly, customer and agent activity at their UIs, collecting the content of agent’s search queries, for example, is not instrumented. Instrumentation (the data that Salesforce collects, stores, and uses as report input) focuses on logging changes to Objects in the Salesforce CRM database.
- Packaged and predefined reports focus on sales Objects—Forecasts, Leads, Opportunities, and Territories. There are no packaged and predefined report types on knowledge items, community posts and replies, or on business processes.
These are the extremes. On balance, the strengths outweigh the limitations. Our evaluation of the customer service capabilities in Salesforce Winter ’13 against our framework for customer service is very positive. We really do recommend it, especially for businesses that are already Sales Cloud customers.
Salesforce.com
Service Cloud Winter ’13
Cross-Channel Case, Knowledge, Account,
and Social Network Management
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January
24, 2013
Salesforce CRM Winter ’13 offers a broad and deep array of customer service capabilities
anchored by the Service Cloud. Read our evaluation. Although the offering needs
improvement in its analytic capabilities, The customer service capabilities of
Salesforce Service Cloud address cross-channel customer service requirements
for many B2B and B2C organizations in all geographies. Read our in-depth evaluation.
Read a sample and download the full article in PDF. (Requires login)
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