Customertimes How To: Uniting Sales Cloud and Service Cloud

By Maham Hafeez - August 19, 2021

Signing the contract is just the first part of your customer’s experience. In any industry, ongoing support and assistance must be provided long after the ink on the deal is dry to make sure that customer needs are met and any issues are resolved.  

Customer service plays a key role in customer retention, and when it’s done correctly, it will help identify potential industry trends and serve as an early warning for issues that are likely to arise. The most successful companies pay attention to this customer insight and use it to improve their products and services.   

Salesforce Service Cloud makes it possible for your team to achieve this goal effectively:  

• Centralize requests from various channels 
• Manage the workload within your team by assigning each case to the person with the right expertise 
• Give team members the right guidelines and communication templates to address client needs 
• Provide team members with the best next steps for resolving a new or known issue 

These features are incredibly useful when it comes to improving customer service. But imagine what’s possible when you combine the capabilities of Service Cloud with the customer insight contained in Sales Cloud.  

Now, a few great things happen:  

1. Customer service has access to every interaction that took place before the deal was finalized, giving them greater insight into each customer’s journey. 
2. Stakeholders can easily see who’s buying what, when they’re buying it, and why they’re buying it, allowing them to improve product and service offerings. 
3. Sales can see what trends and issues are arising, which in turn helps them adapt and improve their sales and marketing strategies.  

I’m going to explain the basics of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud implementations and then share some tips for uniting them so your organization can benefit from better, more impactful customer insight.  

Implementing Sales Cloud 

Let’s start with Sales Cloud implementation. If you need specific instructions for implementing Sales Cloud, Salesforce has a great resource that I’ve linked right here, but here are the basic items that must be set up:  

1. Add Users 
2. Configure existing system to meet business needs 
3. Data Import 
4. Reporting 
5. Roll-out 

Before you begin, select a Salesforce edition that fits your business needs. Editions include: 

• Essentials 
• Professionals 
• Enterprise 
• Unlimited 
• Developer 

Then, begin adding users, following these requirements: 

1. Username 
2. User’s email address  
3. User’s name (MUST be unique across the org) 
4. User license  
5. Profile – determines features, objects, fields, apps access for users 
6. Role (Optional) – determines record level access for users 
7. Locale 
8. Language 

Complete these steps: 

1. Navigate to set-up section 
2. Access Users section 
3. Select “New User” option to create a new user 
4. Fill in required information 
5. Save user to create record 

Or, import users using Dataloader: 

1. Create a csv file with required user information 
2. Select “User” object when importing using Dataloader 
3. Map column names to API names of the fields 
4. Create and save new records 

Then, configure the existing system to meet business needs:  

1. Rename existing Objects/create new Objects 
2. Rename existing Fields/create new Fields 
3. Build relationships between Objects (Parent-Child and Lookup relationships) 
4. Update existing page layouts, create new page layouts, and assign to specific profiles 
5. Import data use Dataloader 
6. Create csv files with each column header acting as the field name and each row acting as the record 
7. Map data in Excel with field API names when importing in Dataloader 
8. Ensure that the relationships built between objects and all required fields are accounted for when importing data 
9. Roll Out to users – Go live 
10. Test system 
11. UAT testing 
12. Go-Live 
13. Set-Up support channels to help users with services, and support 

Implementing Service Cloud 

Once your Sales Cloud instance is set up, move over to Service Cloud. With Service Cloud, users can offer support for any service provided by your business to internal and external stakeholders. Users can automate service steps, streamline workflows, and easily find resources to support customer service agents.  

Again, here’s a helpful resource from Salesforce with set up instructions, and since this can be a bit more complicated, I’ve also linked each of the steps below to detailed Salesforce directions.  

Steps: 

1. Set up Case Management   
2. Set up Entitlement Management  
3. Set up Omni Channels  
4. Set Up Chat features   

Uniting Sales Cloud and Service Cloud  

Case Management and Entitlements are two areas where the information contained in Sales Cloud can be extremely helpful on the customer service side. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.  

Case Management 

Case Management predominantly utilizes Case Object. You can add/remove fields and create page layouts as required to address various requests, along with the following actions:  

1. Add various statuses to Status object to help manage workflow by creating a support process 
2. Set up Email-to-Case to consolidate requests received from other sources into one location 
3. Set up Queues to help address specific types of issues and streamline work management 
4. Set up workflow and assignment rules to ensure that teams with the right skills are routed to address the various stakeholder/client needs and cases are escalated in a timely manner to improve customer satisfaction 
5. Set Up Paths to give agents more customer information at each stage, including information from Sales Cloud regarding pre-sale interactions 
6. Set-Up email templates to ensure consistent communication when addressing customer needs or when communicating internally 
7. Set up case teams to ensure that high level teams can work together to solve complex cases 

Entitlements 

1. Help service agents determine the type of support a customer has access to based on their contract(s) 
2. Set up Milestones to help manage next steps as outlined by business process 

Back Office Integrations 

The key to uniting Sales Cloud and Service Cloud successfully lies in your back office systems. MuleSoft, or something similar, will give you the functionality you need to get actionable data insights from both clouds so your customer service agents can maximize every customer interaction.  

If you need help implementing MuleSoft or want to find out how to get more business value from your Sales Cloud or Service Cloud instances, Customertimes can help!  

We have received Master Navigator Expert level status from Salesforce for both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, and we’d love to show you how the right expertise can make a tremendous impact. Reach out to us here, or visit www.customertimes.com if you’d like to chat with one of our experts.