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Get Started with Service Cloud Essentials

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Explain what Service Cloud Essentials does.
  • Describe how it helps small businesses rock service.

What Is Service Cloud Essentials?

It’s a customer service solution specifically built for small and medium businesses (SMBs) just getting started with customer service. Service Cloud Essentials makes it easy for SMBs to focus on their customers, because it’s easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to buy. Service Cloud Essentials can be ideal for you if you’re:

  • A small business using email and spreadsheets to manage customer service
  • A small business looking for your first customer support solution
  • A current Sales Cloud Essentials customer

Let’s Rock Customer Service

Here are a few ways that Service Cloud Essentials is designed to help small businesses earn standing ovations for their customer service:

Get started quickly—Small businesses don’t have time for complex enterprise-level setups and build outs. They need maximum return with minimum effort—after all, who wants a shiny new gizmo that requires weeks of assembly? Guided walkthroughs and a setup assistant make it easy to quickly get going with Service Cloud Essentials. 

Help customers faster—Service Cloud Essentials is filled with features to help you get faster and smarter about customer service. A service console (also known as an agent console) organizes information for easy, consistent answers, while multichannel support means you can help customers through many possible channels—including email, phone, chat, and social—all from one screen. You can also customize ready-to-use templates to create a self-service Help Center, where your customers can easily find answers to frequently asked questions.

Be productive—As a small, growing business, it’s hard to keep up with increasing demand. That’s why productivity tools such as macros are so important. Macros are automations that let you take multiple actions with a single click to ensure you’re more productive and keeping up with your expanding customer base. 

Scale as you grow—The Lightning App Builder makes it easy to customize your service console with no code, simply dragging what you want where you want it. This helps you meet new demands as your business expands. And thanks to the AppExchange—a marketplace where you can buy or find free Salesforce applications—you can choose from a wide variety of apps to help keep customers happy and maintain control of your growing business.  

Making Customers Happier

In the last unit, we briefly discussed the importance of channels—or the various ways your customers can reach out to you. It turns out that giving your customers a choice in how they communicate with your company is the first step toward delivering extraordinary service. Service Cloud Essentials helps keep customers happy and your whole team productive, whether customers contact you by email, phone, web chat, Facebook Messenger or other social channels, like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or Facebook.

The second step to delivering extraordinary service is making sure that your team can work comfortably with multiple channels simultaneously. The last thing you want to do is burn everyone out with a complicated app—frustrated employees don’t provide first-rate service. That’s why Service Cloud Essentials integrates multiple channels into an easy-to-use help desk called the console, which you can customize to fit your company’s unique support processes.

Turbocharged, Customized Support

Another way to make life easier for your team and customers is to turbocharge your support processes so that they happen like magic. Service Cloud Essentials helps you do just that. With the click of a few buttons, you can choose when and how to follow up with customers and assign relevant tasks.

In the next module, we get familiar with the features that make Service Cloud Essentials such a powerful customer service tool for small businesses like yours. 

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