Customize Service Cloud for Your Business

Learning Objectives

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

• Identify the objects your teams will use in Service Cloud.
  
• Identify changes you can make to standard fields to set up Service Cloud for your team.
  

Standard Objects in Service Cloud

As agents work with customers, it’s important to capture all the info that helps them close cases. This empowers your team to solve customer challenges and provides clear data to report on. Standard objects give you a ready-made place to collect the data that our most successful customers track. 

Let’s take a look at three standard objects in Service Cloud.

Contacts represent the customers your agents work with. Contacts are a great way to capture information that helps your agents give customers a personalized experience.

Accounts represent the companies you do business with. They are where contacts, cases, and other company-level data come together. As your team works with a customer over time, Accounts form the center of your data model.

Cases are the specific issues your team works to resolve. They track key info, like the reason for a case, its status, the support channel used, and any other info your agents need. As cases move along in your support process, this object captures real-time insights into your team’s progress.

To bring your data together, you can associate a case with the related contact and account objects. This is how your data model starts to come together.

Create Custom Fields

In many cases, standard fields get the job done. But if you find that you need to capture additional info, you can create a custom field. As you take stock of what additional fields you need to configure, think back to the goals and objectives you had for Service Cloud.

Maria from Ursa Major Solar checked in with her service manager, looking back at the agent activity data they had been tracking. As they talked through the data, they realized that there was no field to track whether a customer communication was initiated by the customer or an agent. 

So Maria created a custom field: Outbound/Inbound Type. This field is a simple picklist where agents can log whether they reached out to a customer or responded to an incoming request.

With this new data, Maria and the service manager saw a trend: Cases that were closed quickly often included inbound email communications from customers. The service manager used that info to drive a new initiative, investing more in email. They also developed customer-centric email templates to streamline communications.

If you look at your standard fields and find that your team needs to track more info, here are the steps for creating custom fields.

1. Click and select Setup.
   
2. From Setup, click Object Manager.
   
3. Click Case.
   
4. Click Fields & Relationships.
   
5. Click New, then enter the details of your new field.
   

Resources

• Trailhead: Service Cloud for Lightning Experience
• Salesforce Help: Set Up Service Console