To date,
Salesforce.com claims that nearly 9,000 customers have licensed
Service Cloud, four million user licenses have been purchased for
Customer Portal, and approximately 100 customers have licensed
Salesforce Knowledge. Very few customers have licensed
Answers, a community/user forum application that was
introduced last February with Spring '10 release.
Support for social media got our attention. Service Cloud, of
course, supports Chatter, SFDC's application for
collaboration among an organization's internal users. For
example, you might use Chatter to track and communicate
the work to resolve a case, exchanging technical
information and status among level one and level 2 CSRs,
developers, QA personnel, and even the account executive. However,
Service Cloud, and, in fact, all of Salesforce CRM, does not
support external, public social media. SFDC has been
talking about Salesforce for Twitter and a Salesforce for
Facebook or a Facebook Connector for quite a while, but
these are not actual products with warranties and support.
Rather, they're free, downloadable apps from AppExchange
that have been developed by SFDC personnel outside formal product
development. SFDC told us that these are "managed." That
is, they are built to accommodate and support upgrades and they
cannot be modified by the organization that downloads
them. To be sure, they are useful apps, and we gather that
a few thousand organizations have downloaded and deployed
them. Take care in using them.
Our report on Service Cloud Summer '10 updates our report on the
Winter '10 release of Salesforce.com's customer service.
We had described Winter '10 as a "release 1" offering with
basic knowledge management capabilities, limited search,
basic escalation facilities, and virtually absent analytic
functionality. In Spring '10 and Summer '10,
Salesforce.com has made many significant improvements to
Service Cloud. Analytic functionality in Service Cloud 2 Summer
'10 has been improved significantly. Certainly it's no longer a
release 1 offering.
Service Cloud and its Answers, Customer Portal, Entitlements,
Salesforce Knowledge, and Salesforce Mobile add-ons
provide a very broad range of cross-channel,
cross-lifecycle case management, knowledge management, and
social media customer service capabilities. These applications
are positioned to address the requirements of high volume B2C
contact centers that provide support for complex products
as well as B2B contact centers. Within this positioning,
Service Cloud's case management capabilities and
Salesforce Knowledge KM capabilities support
assisted-service and, through the Customer Portal and Force.com-based
public Web sites, support self-service. In addition, Service
Cloud's Answers application supports a level of
peer-service or social service.
We've performed this evaluation of Service Cloud Summer '10
using our new, more general, customer service framework
rather than the framework for evaluating knowledge
management-based customer service offerings, the framework
we used to evaluate Service Cloud Winter '10. The new
framework places less emphasis on knowledge management and
search technologies and places more emphasis on the channels
and customer activities supported. Service Cloud is much more than
a KM-based customer service offering. Its strengths are in
case management and customer activity support. As a
result, it earned better grades both because of its
improvements and because of the changes in our evaluation
criteria. Most of the new and enhanced capabilities in
Spring '10 and in Summer '10 have not been made in
knowledge management or search technologies. Salesforce.com
still has work to do in those areas.
Bottom line, Service Cloud 2 Summer '10 has no major
limitations, no showstoppers. We recommend that you
consider it for your organization's case management,
knowledge management, and account management requirements.
If your organization's customer service experience is built on
your contact center, then Service Cloud 2 could very well be your
best fit.
Salesforce Service Cloud Summer '10
Significantly Improved Cross-Channel, Cross-Lifecycle Customer Service
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, August 5, 2010
