Salesforce.com Sales Cloud

Introduction

In todays highly competitive world, businesses are constantly looking for ways to get and stay ahead of the competition. How can businesses identify prospective clients and convert them to loyal customers in a never ending process. Businesses therefore require a CRM solution that responds to the needs of the business and offers the business the flexibility, to respond adequately and adapt to changes in the market, customer behaviour, etc. and the ability to scale as the business grows and matures. I think the Sales Cloud CRM solution from Salesforce.com is a solution that gives businesses this cutting-edge advantage over their competitors, and not only that, it helps the business grow enormously.

Salesforce.com offers a series of products geared at building powerful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications. The Salesforce.com CRM has been compared to other top players in the industry and is ranked number 1 as of 2014. Check out the results here and see what makes Salesforce.com CRM better than all others.
With the Salesforce.com CRM solution you can increase your ROI (Return On Investment) by up to 70% and your turnover by 38%. Moreover the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud can help you achieve the following:

• boost sales productivity by 36 %
• improve win rates by 26%
• increase pipeline by 25%
• attain a forcast accuracy of plus 45%

This article is aimed at anyone new to Salesforce.com CRM or freshly baked Salesforce.com Admins and Cloud Consultants or anyone with a general interest in CRM. We will take a deeper look at what the Sales Cloud is, when and how to use it and how if applied properly can lead your client to achieve his desired results which will very often be one of the benefits listed above. This blog is called "Thinking in the Cloud 101". I hope that with the thoughts expressed here, you will feel motivated and more informed when venturing into a Salesforce.com Sales Cloud CRM Project.

Let's begin by looking at what the Sales Cloud exactly is.

What is the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud?

I bet someone could imagine the Sales Cloud as a piece of software that he could buy and plug into his organisation to help him achieve his sales goals. Well that someone would be very wrong. First because the Sales Cloud is not software and secondly because it is not a single product that will solve all your clients problems. So what is the Sales Cloud?

I will define the Sales Cloud as follows;

It is a collection of different products, tools and methodologies that helps businesses attain their objectives of growing their businesses by effectively managing leads and prospects and increasing revenue by increasing sales productivity, building and maintaining a more robust pipeline and increasing accuracy of forecast and doing this in such a way that sales, marketing and management are aligned and working together as a cohesive team to guarantee short and long term success.

This is what I call the Sales Cloud. The products, tools and methodologies mentioned in the definition above will be briefly introduced in this section. Always remember that your client's Sales Cloud implementation will always be unique and will require a proper end-to-end thought process to be successful. It will require that you understand your clients and his business better he does. Also mentioned in the definition is the fact that your Sales Cloud implementation should be aimed at achieving lasting results.

The components that make up the Sales Cloud are;

1. Accounts & Contacts

Provides a 360 degree view of customer accounts by using one central place to manage all customer information and interactions. Account teams can be created and used to foster collaboration across cross-functional teams on an account by account bases by letting end users grant access to their accounts and related records to other users.

2. Marketing & Leads

Provides the ability to manage leads in a systematic and structured manner leading to an increase in the number of leads generated and consequently converted. Provides valuable information about potential customers and the lead qualification process by tracking qualified and unqualified leads as well as dead leads and leads that end being paying customers.

3. Campaign management

Used to track and manage different types of campaigns from lead capture to deal closure across all channels. Campaign influence is used to track the impact of multiple marketing campaigns on a single opportunity. Campaign hierarchy also provides information about which campaigns are related to specific marketing programs.

4. Channel Management

Provides public and private online spaces where employees, customers and partners can collaborate. A suitable tool to achieve this is a Salesforce Community. This is a branded space that offers a subset of a Salesforce organization's features and data and allows selected customers and partners to engage in business processes. Another Salesforce.com product that could be used for channel management is Salesforce to Salesforce which enables colaboration with partners who are also Salesforce.com customers. Salesforce to Salesforce allows you to see partner updates on shared records and enables you to report on shared records managed by partners.

5. Partner Management

In addition to channel collaboration via Salesforce to Salesforce, you could use other Salesforce features such as partner recruiting, management, collaboration, sales, marketing and community to engage your partners more.

6. Opportunities

Tracks all opportunity-related data including milestones, decision makers, customer communications, real-time quotes etc. This data can be used to accurately forecast revenue and product demand. Opportunity features you should consider when planning a Sales Cloud implementation for your client include;

• Opportunity teams: can be used to foster collaboration between cross-functional teams which will lead to an increase productivity in sales. 
• Opportunity splits: can be used to split credit across multiple team members. This keeps sales reps and other members motivated. 
• Similar Opportunites: allows users to search for opportunities that share common fields with the current opportunity
• Big Deal Alerts: sends an automated email that includes a snapshot of an opportunity record that has reached a certain threshold. This threshold will normally depend on the opportunity amount and probability.
• Opportunity Update Reminders: sends out an automated email with information about opportunities such as total amount closed and the total forecast amount. You can schedule the frequency of opportunity update reminders.

7. Forecasting

Allows users to view their forecast and the forecast of their subordinates for each forecast category. Forecast category is defined together with the probability when creating the opportunity stage picklist values. Forecasting can be used to forecast sales from multiple perspectives by using forecast types such as Opportunity Revenue, Opportunity Quantity etc. Collaborative forecast can also be used by sales managers to adjust the forecast of their subordinates leading to more accurate forecasting.

8. Product, Price Books and Quotes

Quotes can be used to implement multiple pricing scenarios for each opportunity. In order to use quotes, products and price books must be implemented. Products are the individual items sold by your client's  organization. Prices for these products are defined in a standard or custom price book price list. Products can then be added to an opportunity as product line items. Eventually quotes can then be generated from the opportunity and its products and sent out to customers. The quote shows the total price for all products and services for an opportunity.

9. Chatter

Chatter belongs to Sales Cloud tools that you should implement to increase sales productivity, collaboration and alignment of cross-functional teams. Chatter has the following capabilities which make it accomplish these task splendidly;

• Chatter feed: used to track objects and enable collaboration on a record by record basis. It also allows you to post comments, files and links when collaborating with other users in your organization. You can also set up polls to perform surveys and gather opinions using chatter feeds.
• Chatter Files: used to upload and store files privately or to upload and share files with other coworkers and groups. Users can find and follow files using chatter files.
• Chatter Groups: used to create public or private groups to ease collaboration with specific people including customers who do not belong to an organization.
• Chatter Topics: topics can be used to add tags or topics to chatter post and records to make them easy to find. This feature allows users to be identified and endorsed as topic experts.
• Chattter publisher: publisher actions feature is used to create actions and add them to the Chatter publisher on the home page, on the Chatter tab, in Chatter groups, and on record detail pages. These actions can let users do a number of things from create and update records to open up Visualforce pages which can be built to do virtually anything.
• Chatter Messenger: gives Chatter users real-time presence and instant-messaging capabilities. This means that users will be able see when coworkers are online and engage in private, one-to-one and multi-person instant messaging sessions. Chatter Messenger is built right into Chatter, i.e. it does not need an external client
• Chatter Messages: used for secure private conversations with other Chatter users. Messages are also used to notify people when a file has been shared with them. Messages don't appear in in a user's feed, profile, global search results, or any other part of Chatter that's publicly visible
• Chatter Desktop: desktop application that allows users to collaborate in chatter without opening a browser.

10. Email & Calendering

Enables users to work seamlessly with their favourite calendering and email app. This minimizes the amount of work that is duplicated in different systems significantly. An example of Salesforce.com tool that can be used for email and calendering is Salesforce for Outlook. In is used to sync events, task and contacts from  Salesforce to Outlook or vice versa or both. With Salesforce for outlook, a Salesforce side panel can be added to outlook. This side panel is used to add emails and events to Salesforce records and even create new records without ever leaving Outlook.
Finally email templates can be used to achieve efficient and consistent communication with customers.

11. Mobile & Salesforce 1

Salesforce 1 creates a virtual office anywhere on mobile devices! It is used to log calls, respond to leads, review reports and collaborate using Chatter. Salesforce 1 is THE app that lets you access and update your Salesforce data from iOS and Android devices. With Salesforce 1 you also have access to all your apps and chatter. This means that almost any task that can be accomplished on a desktop is brought to your mobile device via Salesforce 1.

12. Salesforce CRM Content

Used to organize, share, search and manage content using fully searchable repositories called libraries. Library members can be added and given rights to author and manage the content. Multiple versions of content can be added to the library and how frequently Content is viewed or downloaded can also be tracked. Content can be packaged and delivered to external recipients, setting a date on the which the content will expire and recipients can be required to use a password to view the content.

13. Real-time Analytics

Can be used to easily create reports and dashboards to help analyze real-time performance of the business and share and apply insights across teams. Used to track pipeline, deals, revenue and activities. Also used to track and measure the success of the Sales Cloud implementation by measuring factors like user adoption, data cleanliness, number or converted leads etc.

14. AppExchange

An online marketplace for applications and services designed for compatibility with the Sales Cloud to enhance and foster sales success. Use the AppExchange to search for, download and install applications developed by Salesforce.com and it's partner ranging from applications for mass mail, intergration, social CRM etc. AppExchange can be used to find applications that customizes and extends your Sales Cloud implementation to work the way your business works. There is no need in reinventing the wheel, so always check the AppExchange before wasting your client's dollars and you time in building a solution that has been developed and resides on the AppExchange just waiting for you to use it.

15. Data.com

This can help to shorten the sales cycle by giving real-time access to clean contact and lead information. This makes it possible to quickly identify contact roles, decision makers and influencers for an organization's accounts and opportunities.

16. Other

Multi-currency: allows organizations to use multiple currencies in opportunities, forecast, reports, quotes, and other currency fields. This is very relevant when rolling out a global Sales Cloud implementation. A corporate current can be set and active currencies which can be used within the organization and their conversion rates are also set up. Advanced currency management can also be enabled on and allows the management of dated exchange rates within opportunities. The opportunity close date will determine which conversion rate to use. When implementing the multiple currency feature put a lot of thought in how this feature will affect reports and dashboards.

Territory management: typically used in a private sharing model to grant users access to accounts based on territories. A territory is simply a grouping of accounts based on a set of common characteristics such as region, product line, etc. Bear in mind that an account can belong to multiple territories, but an opportunity can belong to only a single territory. This means that users will have a separate forecast for each territory they belong to. Customizable forecasting must be enabled to use territory management.

Translation Workbench: used to specify languages to be translate, assign translators to these languages, create translations for customizations that have been made to a Salesforce organization, and override labels and translations from managed packages. Everything from custom picklist values to custom fields can be translated. The translation workbench is very important for global Sales Cloud implementations. I have seen this mentioned any where as part of the Sales Cloud but I think it's importance should not be underestimated.

Benefits of Using the Sales Cloud

The benefits of using the Sales Cloud can be summarized as follows;

• Strong lead generation process leading to a high lead quality rate and subsequent high lead conversion ratio
• better understanding of customers.
• better understanding pipeline and the derivatives that drive business
• standardized quoting and pricing
• better management of the sales process 
• better alignment of sales and marketing 
• high data quality
• 360 degree view of customers with easy access to contact and opportunity information
• streamline business processes using, automation, workflow and approval processes.

These are the major benefits your client will get from using the Sales Cloud. Next let's look at why your client might wish to implement the Sales Cloud solution or when you should recommend the Sales Cloud solution to your clients.

When to use the Sales Cloud

Before we delve into the issues that can be resolved using the Sales Cloud, it is important to first consider what the first steps in any Sales cloud implementation should be. These first steps will let you identify your client's unique problems, pain points and what he intends to achieve with his Sales Cloud implementation.

During the analysis phase of your implementation, you will have to gather requirements from your client's main stakeholders. This often happens in breakout discovery workshops where you will talk to stakeholders to learn how they currently operate (As Is-Process), what their pain points are and what they hope will be achieved with the Sales Cloud implementation (To Be Process). It is only after you conduct this discovery meetings, that you will be able to draft the requirements document on which you will based your solution design in the design phase. In this section we will look at a few problems that most prospective clients looking to implement the Sales Cloud CRM solution will have.

Most often the problems that your client will face that might make them consider implementing a CRM solution will revolve around

• Lead generation process
• Revenue
• Sales productivity

These might sound like trivial issues. But they require a great deal of though and if implemented properly, will boost your client's growth and productivity enormously. We will look at these issues separately, analyzing what exactly your client might be looking to optimize and look at what Sales Cloud feature or tool will be best suited to solve a problem or achieve a certain goal. There might be some overlapping between the tools which makes the whole solution processing much more fun but at the same very challenging. How do you maintain the balance between doing too much or doing just the right thing? Always remember that no two clients are the same even if they are in the same line of business and sell the same products and services. After each implementation it is the norm to write a case study that will help in future implementations, but when working for a single new client always start out with a clean slate and use your case studies much later in the solution design process, else you run the risk of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. That said let's move on and look at a few issues that might need a Sales Cloud implementation to address.

Lead generation process

Many will consider the lead generation as belonging to marketing and they would be completely right. But if you are looking to build a strong pipeline by converting more leads and building a strong base of loyal customers and if you are looking for a better alignment of your sales and marketing departments, then you will have to strongly look at the lead generation process as a possible Sales Cloud solution to implement for your customer. Any business where the right hand does not know what the left is doing will eventually collapse due to inefficiency. Gone are the days when sales and marketing used to compete with each other. Today they should compliment each other and use IT to leverage and align their task with your clients ultimate business goals. This is where the Sales Cloud comes in. If you can convince your client to see things this way, then you are already on your way to a successful Sales Cloud implementation.

Your client may face the following issues during around the lead generation process;

• poor lead data quality
• difficulty in reporting on leads
• ineffectiveness of campaigns leading to poor ROI
• poor alignment of marking and sales

These are some of the issues you might have to deal with as a Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant. So you will need to analyze what the causes of these problems are, propose a strategy to solve these problems and eventuelly convince your client why you think your solution will solve his problem.

Poor lead data quality might occur because during the lead generation process, important data is not collected from the prospect or lead. How about using custom fields on the lead page layout and validation rules to enforce that critical information be stored for a lead? How about using a status picklist to make sure that the lead process supports different statuses? New leads can then always be created with a status such as open, when a lead is converted, its status could automatically be set to qualified using a Workflow Field Update. This will definitely make the lead process more transparent and reporting to analyze leads will also become easy.

Ineffective campaigns can be caused by the fact that marketing is not able to track which opportunities directly result from the campaigns they run and therefore do not know where to invest their dollars. The result is often a poor ROI. How about using campaign influence feature and contact roles on opportunities to make tracking which campaigns impact an opportunity seamless? When contacts belonging to the contact role on the opportunity are added as campaign members, the campaign will automatically be added to the campaign influence related list on the opportunity.You can also use campaign hierarchies to automatically track which campaigns belong to which programs run by marketing.

How about aligning marketing and sales by giving sales reps visibility into lead data? This can be achieved by simply setting the Org Wide Defaults (OWD) for leads to public read-only. This will however mean that everyone in the organization can see lead data. If you want to share this data only with sales operation, then use role hierarchy and sharing rules to accomplish this by setting OWD for Leads to private and then using a sharing rule to share leads with the sales manager and his subordinates. Equally you can expose sales data or opportunities to marketing by using a private sharing model on opportunities and using role hierarchy and sharing rules to give marketing read-only access to opportunities.
But more important give marketing the possibility to track and report on dead leads, so that they can be able to improve on lead quality.

Increasing Revenue

Your client may be lagging behind in growth and may want to understand why and use the Sales Cloud to grow and increase revenue. Some problems which might cause your client to suffer from growth stagnation are;

• poor sales processes and methodology
• poor data quality
• inefficient sales reps
• inaccurate forecast

After understanding your client's current sales process and methodologies, you should try to identify parallels and differences in these processes and create different sales process for different business lines or units. Further optimize the sales process by creating different record types, page layouts and stage pick field values to support different lines of business. This will automatically increase data quality as you can customize page layouts to display only fields relevant to a specific business line.

The stage pick list which determines the business process should be linked to the probability and forecast category fields. This means that at each stage the probability field gives the probability of that deal closing and this causes the opportunity to be assigned to a forecast category. For example, a close won detail will usually have a probability of 100% and belong to forecast category commit, while a deal in the Proposal/Price Quote stage might have a probability of 80% and belong to the forecast category Best Case.
After analyzing your client's sales process and methodologies, invest a lot of time into designing the business process stages and the corresponding probabilities and forecast category. This is because the forecast categories will be used to improve the forecast for your client's organisation. You should also enable and configure collaborative forecasting which will enable manages to edit the forecast of their subordinates leading to an increase in forecast accuracy.

Inefficiency of sales reps might result from a couple of factors; is sales getting bad lead data from the lead generation process? are sales rep forgetting to perform follow-up task on deals at the right time? is there a lot of manual work going on that prevents the sales reps from selling effectively etc. It is your job as a Sales Cloud Consultant to ask your client the right discovery questions and find out exactly what the cause of the problem is. In the next sub-section we will look at automation and collaboration which can immensely increase the effectiveness and productivity of your client's sales reps.

Improving Sales Productivity

Another major issue that business will often face is low productivity. This can be cause by a number of issues some of which are;

• too many manual task
• data quality issues
• poor collaboration across cross functional teams

Sales reps might be performing too many manual task which makes them inefficient. Instead of using their valuable time to sell, they are busy manually updated data, sometimes in multiple systems. The first step to improving your sales's reps productivity and efficiency is making sure they don't have to carry out mundane task like manually setting up appointments, aggregating data from multiple systems into spreadsheets etc. Let them concentrate on what they do best, which is selling. This can be achieved by using automation. For example, manual tasks performed by sales reps can be reduced or in some cases eliminated by implementing Workflow Field Updates to update fields based on certain conditions. There is no reason why a sales rep should have to manually set the probability and forecast category when they update the stage of the opportunity. Doing this automatically through a Workflow also eliminates a potential source of error. There are times when the sales rep will need to change the forecast category manually to advance the opportunity in the pipeline for forecasting reasons. But this should be rare cases, have a good business reason and should suit your client's sales process and methodology.
How about using Workflow to set up follow up task for your sales reps at specific times in the future or when a certain criteria is met? and how about sending email reminder emails if the users do not perform follow up task?. For example, automatically setting a task for the sales rep to call the decision maker two days after an opportunity enters the "Quote" stage can be accomplished in this way. If the sales rep does not log a call for that opportunity two and a half days, automatically send an email reminder.
Also automate approval processes to kick in and be routed to the right approver when a certain criteria is met. You could also enable approvals through chatter feeds or even directly from emails making the approval process much faster and more efficient.

The problem of collaboration can occur for a good number of reasons; lack of the know-how to efficiently coordinate cross functional teams, destructive competition between cross-functional teams; power play, internal company politics, old bad habits etc. After understanding the root cause of this dis-alignment between cross functional teams, take appropriate measures to resolve it. Remind your client that each Salesforce.com Implementation is a golden opportunity to do things differently.

The Sales Cloud offers amazing collaboration possibilities. The best of which is Chatter in my opinion. How about enabling feed tracking for the opportunity object and any objects which are vital to your client's sales process? this will enable real time record updates, communication, decision making, surveys, approval processes and other actions that can be defined using the Chatter Publisher. Chatter is indeed awesome and anyone who has used it in a real time production environment will agree with me.
You could also enable team selling on opportunities. Users can create teams and add them to opportunities. These teams could comprise of anyone in the organization thereby fostering collaboration. Team roles are used to identify each team members role within the team and what they are allowed to do. After enabling team selling, you could also enable opportunity splits. Sales reps will likely be more productive and motivated if they see that they are getting recognition for the business they are bringing in. This could be in form of commissions or whatever way your client has chosen to reward his sales reps. Opportunity splits will help determine each team members contribution when working a deal.
Finally you could also enable account teams on accounts. Account teams let users open up their accounts and related records such as contacts and opportunities to a few chosen individuals. Just like with opportunity teams, they can create roles and assign them to team members. These roles will determine what team members can see and what they can do.

In this section we looked at common problems that can be solved using the Sales Cloud and looked at what components of the Sales Cloud can be used to solve some of these problems. As usual your client's problems will be unique to his business and you will have to understand your client better than he does and then design a solution tailored perfectly to his business. Always remember that each Sales Cloud implementation is an opportunity to do things differently. Let you client know this every chance you get, because the likelihood that some clients will cling to outdated and mundane processes is very high. Their excuse will always be, "but we have always done it this way" and what should your answer be? Yes right, every Sales Cloud implementation is an opportunity to change things, make them better.

I will like to finish this introduction to the Sales Cloud by talking about the different stages involved in a typically Sales Cloud implementation and the best practices you should adhere to.

Implementing the Sales Cloud

When implementing the Sales Cloud it is important to understand typical challenges and learn and apply best practices. One such best practice is applying the six steps of Plan, Analyze, Design, Build, Validate and Deploy to your Sales Cloud implementation. We will look briefly at all of these stages to identify the main task to be carried out at each stage to achieve a successful Sales Cloud implementation.

Plan

The planning phase of the project is mostly about defining the purpose and scope of the project, defining roles, identify resources and risks. Setting milestones is a very important part of this processes. During the complete implementation, proper communication between the client and the implementation team and within the client's organization is very important. Such communication should be aimed at building buzz, informing the users of changes to come and making sure they are prepared. This is absolutely necessary for adoption. So a communication plan also has to be established within this planning phase. A training plan which entails what planning strategy will be used is also discussed in the planning phase. Finally and most important, use this phase to also identify executive sponsors for the project. These are individuals in your client's organization preferably at the management level who will commit to sponsoring the project and building buzz.
The document which results from this phase is the Statement of Work (SOW) which will document, purpose and scope, deliverables, milestones & timeline, resources, risk etc.

Analyze

The next phase is the analysis phase. The first step in this phase is to identify product champions. These will most like be high performers in sales and marketing within your client's organization. It is important to communicate with these small group of individuals at this stage to gain buy-in for the project. Let them understand the purpose and scope of the Sales Cloud implementation and give them the chance to be heard. Gaining buy-in with product champions is absolutely necessary for later adoption and thus a successful implementation. Secondly using the SOW as the starting point, hold discovery workshops with all stakeholders to gather and prioritize requirements. The requirements document should be the main product of this stage. Have your client start communication with the end users in order to build buzz.

Design

In the design phase the requirements document from the analysis phase is used to design a solution for the Sales Cloud implementation. The solution will be divided into a solution and a technical solution design. The solution design is a functional design revolving around all the customization that will have to be done on the platform and you as the Sales Cloud consultant will be responsible for designing this solution. Normally you will have a technical solution architect do the design of the technical solution for you. In my experience, most senior developers are also well equipped to do the technical design. The technical design revolves around the Apex code and Visualforce pages that will have to be created to compliment the functional design. Always look into alternative solutions together with your client before venturing into Apex code. Code always introduces a level of complexity which at times is just not necessary, so do not use Apex code just because you have a developer to spare.  The design documents that result from this process should  be concise, to the point and easy to follow because they will be needed later for maintenance task probably long after you are gone. Have you client communicate to the end users to build buzz.

Build

Once the design phase is successfully completed, the build phase begins. In this phase the application is configured and the Apex code is developed.
The alpha review of the product then takes place. This is when the client will see his brand new Sales Cloud implementation for the first time. The purpose of this review is to gather initial feedback and implement it before the beta review which takes place later in this phase as well. Other important task also take place parallel in this phase. Depending on your Sales Cloud implementation these task could include cleansing and preparing data for migration, running data test migrations, developing test scripts, developing training material etc. Also have you client communicate to the end users to build buzz.

Validate

During the validate phase UAT (User Acceptance Test) is carried out and feedback is documented. If possible do not implement any feedback at this stage else you might put go-live at risk. Talk to the client and come up with a plan on how to manage feedback. Development of training materials continues at this stage. A support plan for go-live is developed and communication to end users continues to build buzz.

Deploy

This phase should begin with the training kickoff. The training should take place in a full sandbox environment if possible, so that users can feel free to try out the application without fear of breaking anything, while using most like data. Parallel to training and depending on your Sales Cloud implementation, other task such as a final data migration and integration of custom code could be carried out. Setting the users to active and informing them to retrieve their passwords and login details from their emails means your Sales Cloud implementation is finally live and you can lean back and have a cold beer. Or? Not so fast. After go-live it is necessary to hold one final knowledge transfer session with the client and then write a case study with lessons learned before having that beer.

Very important is that at the end of each stage make sure you obtain sign-off from the client before moving to the next stage. This will keep everyone aligned, manage expectations and enable transparency at all phases of the project.

Conclusion

This has been a short article on the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud. It is not meant to be used as an implementation guide or anything of the sort. The sole purpose of this document is to give you an overview of what the Sales Cloud is all about and to equip you with some thought patterns and best practices that will hopefully be of use when you are about to go into a Sales Cloud implementation or just looking around for information.
Interesting topics to look at is how the Sales Cloud ties together with the so called Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Customers (IoC) and what part Salesforce 1 mobile app has to play in this. These are the buzz words these days. I will explore these questions in a future blog. As usual feel free to challenge my views and leave a comment. Thanks for reading

Salesforce.com Service Cloud

Introduction

What does Service mean to you?

As a Service Cloud Consultant, or at least as an aspirant answering this question in a way that makes sense to you and you client is of utmost importance to a successful implementation of the Service Cloud.

To me Service is what my client wants. It is my job to help him achieve it. To me it is this simple. But there are times when you have to force your client to really think about what he wants. Having the courage to do this, and the technique to do it in a way that actually motivates your client to rethink and possibly rework some of his business processes guarantees a successful implementation of the Service Cloud

What type of service organisation am I dealing with?

Understanding the type of service organization you will be building a solution for is of utmost importance for a successful implementation. This might sound like a trivial step but it isn't. Is your client's service organisation based on his products and services? is it opened to all his clients or is it an internal help desk for his employees? what are the business hours? 24/7? is it a telesales service organization? are support agents up-selling or cross selling when dealing with customer issues? is it a hot line of some sort? does the support organization have field agents?

Understanding how your client's organization is structured in detail is the most important think you have to start thinking about even before you begin with the planning phase of your implementation.

If you landed on this blog, I am pretty sure you know what Salesforce.com is. So the second most important question is:

What is the Service Cloud?

In my own words,

the Service Cloud refers to a variety of methodologies and tools which can be variably combined with one another depending on the requirements and needs of YOUR CLIENT to help him grow his business, by keeping his customers satisfied and loyal, making his service agents more productive and doing all of this in the most cost efficient way possible.

Although not all of these tools and methodologies were invented by the bright folks at Salesforce.com e.g KCS (Knowledge Centered Solution), CTI (Computer Telefony Integration), Waterfall Model for your Service Cloud Implementation just to name a few, what they have brilliantly done, is to engineer tools like the Service Cloud Console, the Knowledge base etc. and packaged these neatly into what we call the Service Cloud.

Notice that in my definition I wrote YOUR CLIENT. I am laying emphasis on your client because it is important, that you start thinking of your client and the service challenges he is facing as being very unique to him. Two clients might and will in most cases want exactly the same thing. But their implementations will most likely never be the same although you will use the same Service Cloud. Your job as a Service Cloud Consultant is to find out what makes your client unique, what makes his business tick and then use this information to create a unique Service Cloud solution well tailored to fit your clients needs. Next lets look at why we need the Service Cloud.

Why you need the Service Cloud

There are probably hundreds of tools out there that can be used to aid your client's business and possibly make it grow. But are any of these tools as versatile and easy to implement as the Service Cloud? I doubt it.
When a potential client approaches you to discuss a service issue, more often than not, they will be looking to improve one of the following;

• customer satisfacton (CSAT)
• agent performance
• cost efficiency

Customer Satisfaction

Your client's customers are the center of his business. Without them, your client will not have any business at all and you will most likely be unemployed. So you have to do your best to help your client keep his customers satisfied and loyal because helping your client is helping yourself. Your client's customers will most likely require the following to keep them happy;

• to be heard, listened to and taken seriously
• to avoid having to repeat themselves and restate their problems each time they contact support
• to avoid waiting in queues forever to speak to an agent
• to have their issues resolved almost immediately and not being bounced from one Agent or department to another
• to have their issues resolved the first time they call support
• sufficient communication flow when they report an issue and it is bring processed
• ability to solve problems on their on by using tools you provide

These are some of the few things that you will need to think about when your client tells you he wants to improve his customer satisfaction. You will need to ask your client some tough questions to discover why his customers are dissatisfied. You might need to question and challenge some of you client's business processes.

After fully understanding your client's problems and the causes, you will need to think about which Service Cloud components are best suited to solve your client's problems;

• do support agents need a lot of time to find the data they need to respond to customers? how about Knowledge base and Solutions or Chatter Answers to throw suggested solutions at your agents without them having to do anything? etc....
• are agents having trouble identifying clients and the type of support they are entitled to? how about IVR(Interactive Voice Response) together with CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) to pull up your user's data before the agent even answers the call. How about setting up Entitlements, so agents can immediately see on the Account, Contact, Asset, Product or Contract what level and type of support a user is entitled to? etc...
• are frustrated customers hanging up because they are waiting in the queue forever? how about using IVR to aid them solve some of their problems or suggest alternatives? how about using call deflection techniques like Self-Service portals, Customer Portals with FAQ and Knowledge article sections so your clients' customers wouldn't have to call support at all? or maybe your client just needs to hire more agents?

These are a few thoughts that should swirl around your head once you have identified your clients problems and causes and are moving into the solution design phase. But do not forget that just because you can do something does not mean you should do it. YOUR CLIENT IS UNIQUE, SO IS HIS SOLUTION.

Agent Performance

We established above that without happy and loyal customers, you as a Service Cloud Consultant will be unemployed because your client will run out of business eventually. Guess what, same holds for support agents because it is their job to keep the clients happy. More important, they are the voice and sometimes the face of your client's organization. Big responsibility.

Support agents might complain about the following;

• outdated systems which make it difficult for them to do their job
• having to pull in data from a couple of different systems when answering customer issues
• having to ask the customer for his information each time he calls
• fatigue and long or inflexible working hours

These are some of the things agents will generally complain about. Some will complain about the pay but that is nothing we as Service Cloud consultants can do to help with this problem. But if we help out client cut service cost, he just might be able to pay his agents more, who will in turn keep the customers satisfied and spending more and we get to be employed. How about that.

You will need to spend time with the support agents to understand what their pain points are. After that you will be in a better position to use the Service Cloud to address their issues. When designing a solution to increase agent performance, you should think about the following;

•  should the agent have all the information he needs to be able to service his client as soon as he says hello?. This implies already knowing who the client is, what level of service he is entitled to, his activity history, any previous exchanged emails, his Assets or products, etc. basically everything. How about the setting up a Call Center with Service Cloud Console with an integrated Softphone? this will pull up and display all the customer information an agent needs and some of the information he needs to solve the customers issue e.g suggested solutions, knowledge articles. The agent can send emails to the customer with product details, answers to questions etc., write history logs, document case details, create articles etc. without ever leading the service console. Pretty slick stuff.
• how would you reduce the call volume the agents have to deal with daily? how about implementing call deflection techniques such as Self-Service Portals where customers can self register, open cases and monitor the status of their cases? how about implementing Web-to-Case and Email-to-Case capabilities to automatically create and assign cases to your agents so cases are more efficiently handled? how about exposing the live Agent on your client's website of Customer Portal and implementing skill-based routing so each agent gets to work on cases best suited to his abilities

These are some of the questions you should be asking yourself as you venture into the design phase of your Service Cloud implementation aimed at increasing agent performance.

Cost Efficiency

Last but not the least is the issue of cost efficiency. Your client might realize he has to keep many different system alive so he can serve his customers. This is not only costly but also slows down agents when they are servicing client issues. 

This directly leads to the second issue your client might want to address; the Average Handle Time (AHT). This is basically the time the agent spends with the client. Keeping this time to as minimum as possible, while still giving your customers the best service possible is a key to saving cost.

Some on the techniques already mentioned above can also be used here to solve this problem. If the agent has all the information he needs at his fingertips or is one screen a way from it, serving the client quickly and efficiently becomes a piece of cake. This will also require that you client has all of the information in one system. There are times when this is neither desirable nor possible. In this you can leverage the amazing capabilities of Apex and Visualforce to ensure that your service agent is still just one screen away from the information he needs.

Wrap-up time is also very important when talking about efficiency and saving cost. Support agents might need this time to search for and email a solution to client, write case comments, document a solution or create an article etc. How much wrap-up time do support agents need between calls? How can this time be maximized efficiently thereby reducing cost?

Call deflection is in my opinion the most important factor when your client strives to minimize cost or be cost efficient. If your clients to not need to call you to have their problems solved or questions answered, you would not need to think about AHT, wrap-up time etc. There should be no need for your customer to call you to ask a question that has been asked a hundred times by other customers. There should be no need for your customer to call you if his question or issue does not require immediate assistance. How about "call back" possibilities or letting users create cases through other channels such as the Web, Email, Portals and Live Agent. 

The Service Cloud offers very powerful Call deflection possibilities. If your client request to be more cost efficient, I will recommend you immerse your self completely in call deflection and do not come out if you will not make your customer smile from ear to ear.

Having looked at the general reasons why you might need to implement the Service Cloud, let's look briefly at how you would go about it.

The First Steps

1. Identify your metrics. How would you know that your Service Cloud implementation was a success if you can't measure it's outcome
2. Identify an executive sponsor. This is absolutely necessary for adoption. If your Service Cloud solution is not being used, then it is worthless. You need an executive sponsor to champion the whole project, build hype and get everyone motivated.

When these two steps are taken, you can then go ahead with gathering your requirements. There are two main ways to gather requirements. The first would be to watch your client in action. I recommend being your client's inactive service agent for a day or more if needed. This means you actually sit with your client's service agents for a whole day, observe how they do their job and ask questions. The most important of which should revolve around "pain points". These are the people who deal with the clients on a daily basis and therefore in the best position to tell you what is wrong with the system.

The second way to gather your requirements would be to talk with the most important Stakeholders since the success of your Service Cloud implementation will of great interest to them. These will also mostly likely be the people with whom you will define your metrics for success. All these steps belong to the planning phase of your project.

From here on you will then move through the different project phases of design, build, test, validate and deploy. These however are topics of their own that we will look at on another.

Components of the Service Cloud.

I salute you if you have read up to this point. I know this is not an easy read. In this section, I will just list the most commonly used components of the Service Cloud. In later post I will examine each and everyone of them in detail, what they are good for and when to use them. So stay tune.
The Service Cloud offers the following powerful features which you can used to address your clients service concers;

• Service Cloud Console. Requires a Call Center App. Very useful when integrated with the Case Management Process, Case feed, Live Agent and the SoftPhone
• IVC, CTI and the SoftPhone
• Live Agent
• Case Management (Web-to-Case, Email-to-Case, Assignment, Auto-response & Escalation Rules etc.)
• Case Feed
• Entitlements
• Knowledge Base
• Chatter Answers (Solutions & Ideas)
• Self-Service Portals
• Service Cloud Portals (Communities)
• Mobile (Salesforce 1 for field agents)

These are the main components which make up the Service Cloud. These components will be looked at in more detail in upcoming post. Stay tuned.

Conclusion

Although I would have liked to jump directly into the different components of the Service Cloud, I believe handling them in different post will be much more efficient.
The central theme of my discussion has been; you have to listen to your client because he is unique, has unique problems and require a unique Service Cloud implementation. Challenge my views and ideas and start a conversation so we can all learn and grow. I thank your for reading.