Salesforce Lightning Platform vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

We use Salesforce Lightning Platform in everyday business as sales coordinators. By using this tool, we are able to send new requests to clients and communicate regarding pending proposals in real-time. This also tool holds many of our client accounts where we are able to monitor their sales and revenue.

It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with

Incentivized

• Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
• Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
• Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
• Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
• Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• Can be cumbersome: takes multiple clicks to get where you need to go
• Lightning is slower than original Salesforce, and it is very noticeable
• The UI change means sometimes I can't find what I need, so I have to switch back to the Classic version to find it

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

UI can be quite complex, but the more that is required will bring more complexity. Can handle complexity and variety very well, but makes ground-level views harder when not knowing full extent of functionality. Finding new functionalities can be difficult to pinpoint on some pages

Incentivized

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

Salesforce's support is top-notch. They have subject-matter experts that are accessible at all times to address needs as they come up. They let you know in advance when there are system updates and enhancements so that you are prepared for upcoming changes. I've never had an issue that wasn't addressed immediately when reaching out for support.

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

We were previously using an older version prior to it becoming Salesforce Lightning Platform so we were well adverse on the advantages of using a CRM, to begin with. It made sense to convert to Salesforce Lightning Platform after we were given a free trial of the platform. Certain reps were chosen to experiment with it and from there a decision was made to move forward. We've been customers ever since.

Incentivized

Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• Better visibility of Accounts and Contacts interactions makes it easier to maintain during employee transitions.
• Tracking of current jobs and relating them to past jobs is very useful.
• More efficient use of Sales Reps time.
• Sales Managers have good visibility into how their people are working.

Incentivized

• Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
• The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
• Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
• Limited to annual subscription model

Incentivized