Gartner recognized Salesforce for its completeness of vision, and ability to execute.

The Service Cloud platform equipped organizations with technology to digitally transform their offerings overnight and to enable customers to provide world-class service from anywhere, even during a challenging year for many

Service Cloud’s new offerings — including Service Cloud Voice, Workforce Engagement, Pre-Built Einstein Bots, and Visual Remote Assistant Field Service — give organizations the technology they need to support agents working from home, in the field, or in a hybrid model

Gartner has named Salesforce a Leader in the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) Magic Quadrant for the 13th consecutive year. In fact, over two-thirds (68%) of prospective CEC customers Gartner contacted shortlisted Salesforce Service Cloud as their first-, second- or third-choice product — over 25% higher than the company’s nearest competitor.

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Through this past year’s immense challenges, Salesforce remained more committed than ever to empowering every service employee – from agents in the call center to mobile workers in the field – with the right tools and data to quickly deliver the right information to customers across multiple channels. Service Cloud on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform offers a complete, differentiated range of solutions for customer service, with complete service offerings ranging from customer service, contact center management, field service management, and conversational service.

• Service Cloud Voice brings together phone, digital channels, and CRM data in one central view for service agents, and offers the agent real-time call transcription and AI-powered guidance on recommended next steps.
  • For the first time, customers can connect their existing phone systems into Service Cloud Voice with Service Cloud Voice for Partner Telephony, generally available in June 2021, creating a unified agent and digital channel experience to deliver faster, smarter and more personalized service.
• Service Cloud Workforce Engagement, also generally available in June 2021, is a new workforce planning product that uses artificial intelligence to help service leaders predict how many requests will come into the contact center, and on which channels — including phone, email, web chat, text and social.
  • Service leaders can intelligently plan staffing needs, matching agents to work based on their skills, availability and shift preference. Agents have a single workspace that integrates data, as well as real-time coaching and on-demand training from anywhere with myTrailhead, an online learning platform integrated directly into Service Cloud.
• Service Setup Assistant walks through essential setup tasks to get Service Cloud up and running in minutes. After a few clicks, teams can start using key Service Cloud features that are configured with optimal settings and layouts that can be easily customized.
  • Service Setup Assistant sets up queues, macros, and flows to streamline your workflows, optimizes high-use page layouts, sets up quick text responses and case email notifications, which enables teams to take on higher-priority tasks and boost productivity.

“When the world shut down last year, customer service demand skyrocketed — all while agents worked shifted from offices to their homes and an all-digital environment,” said Clara Shih, CEO of Service Cloud, Salesforce. “We listened closely to our customers and doubled down on our commitment to innovation that was needed in the moment, helping organizations and businesses provide best-in-class service experiences for their stakeholders, from their customers to their employees. We’re thrilled that our efforts contributed to being named a Leader in the CRM Customer Engagement Center Magic Quadrant for a 13th consecutive year.”

Prolific innovations and industry-specific offerings

Over the past 12 months, Salesforce has added more than 230 new features and enhancements to Service Cloud, including Service Cloud Voice. It has also introduced the ability to integrate with other contact center voice offerings.

Salesforce has also continued to invest in further extending and deepening industry-specific offerings through native development, acquisitions, and the partner ecosystem. And through its Vlocity acquisition in February 2020, Salesforce extended industry solutions for communications, media and entertainment, energy, utilities, insurance, health and government organizations, providing feature sets that enhanced and complemented industry capabilities and product knowledge, opened up new industry capabilities built on the Salesforce platform and provided customers with even more tools and expert guidance to digitally transform.

How Service Cloud responded to the COVID-19 pandemic

This past year presented countless challenges and obstacles for everyone — from businesses and governments to support agents and managers — to continue delivering vital services.

In response,Salesforce launched Work.com and Vaccine Cloud — two solutions drawing on Service Cloud’s capabilities that combined are key resources for over 100 state and local governments, healthcare companies, and private sector businesses.

• Work.com was designed to help business and community leaders around the world reopen safely, re-skill employees, and respond efficiently on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. The offering included new solutions to accelerate private and public sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including employee wellness assessment; shift management; contact tracing; emergency response management; and grants and volunteer management.
• Vaccine Cloud was created to help government agencies, healthcare organizations, businesses, nonprofits and educational institutions more rapidly, safely and efficiently deploy and manage their vaccine programs. The solution enables many government agencies and healthcare organizations to handle the complexity, speed and scale necessary for vaccine administration.

Scaling service from the call center to the field

The ability to safely and effectively deliver field service was critical to many businesses last year — in fact, Salesforce’s State of Service 2020 report revealed that 80% of decision makers consider field service to be key to their overall strategy. Now, as the world reopens, field service continues to undergo a massive transformation as in-person safety and new precautions become essential considerations.

It’s still as important as ever for field technicians to have the right information and tools to get jobs completed the first time, on time, every time. For example, mobile technicians can reduce time on site by using Visual Remote Assistant, which allows technicians and agents to see what the customer sees through video support, so they can resolve complex issues from anywhere.

Through the last year, Salesforce saw multiple customers from a variety of industries use Service Cloud to quickly pivot their operations during the pandemic. As of June 2021, Salesforce has an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 in CRM Customer Engagement Center category, based on 293 reviews on Gartner Peer Insights.

• “Service Cloud was critical to our successful COVID-19 response. We experienced a 12000% increase in customer cases over the past year. With Salesforce Service Cloud, we quickly enabled automation tools to streamline responses to customers.” – Director of Business Intelligence in the Government sector
• “After implementing SF Service Cloud our customer satisfaction have improved, the customer success team works better, and we are driving fast personalized customer service to over 25,000 users of our platform. Before that, everything was manual and we were not able to keep up, the churn rate was disastrous because of lack of communication and poor customer service on our end.” — Director of Demand Generation in the Transportation sector
• “Our overall experience with Service Cloud has been a positive one. We are able to consistently make incremental improvements to help reach our business goals. Salesforce provides considerable growth and improvement opportunities, giving us plenty of options to choose from as we continue our strategic growth moving forward.” – Senior Manager, Customer Success in the Infrastructure and Operations sector

Learn more about Service Cloud news and innovations and learn more about the Gartner report.