In today’s world, companies must stay ahead of ever-changing customer expectations. Customers want personalized service experiences. They want to be able to use the channel of their choice, whether that’s calling, emailing, tweeting, texting, or using a new channel that just emerged. Oh, and they want this service to be fast and efficient. To make this even more difficult, companies are no longer competing only with the customer experiences delivered by established peers within their industry, but also with upstart competitors, who are differentiating increasingly with service.

While customers expect service experiences that are fast, personalized and available through their preferred channels, companies are forced to make difficult tradeoffs every day as they balance meeting their customer’s needs and innovating for the future, with their business constraints, like cutting costs.  Established companies often have deep investments in inflexible, legacy customer service systems, making it difficult and costly to improve existing support channels or add new ones. Fast-growing companies are often forced to make trade-offs between selecting a lightweight helpdesk that solves for their immediate needs, instead of investing in more robust solutions that can scale as they grow.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce the next generation of Service Cloud. Service Cloud, powered by Salesforce Lightning, provides every company with a flexible, modern customer service platform that is quick to set-up, easy to learn and can be easily customized to meet their needs today and in the future.

New innovations for Service Cloud include:

Service Out-of-the-Box empowering any company to build a modern customer service center in a single day. Case management is now pre-built into Service Cloud, and a new streamlined set-up experience simplifies the steps needed to deploy service on essential channels—with clicks, not code. Service admins can add a customer community and knowledge base, as well as connect to email, Facebook and Twitter feeds—some in as little as five steps. And wIth Trailhead, Salesforce’s online, gamified learning platform, anyone can take one of the 20+ free, guided modules to learn how to deploy, configure and customize Service Cloud.

AppExchange and Lightning App Builder for Service provide customer service teams with an easy way to customize and extend Service Cloud. Using the Lightning App Builder, companies can extend functionality by simply dragging-and-dropping components to empower agents to deliver a personalized experience. Companies can further extend Service Cloud functionality with more than 75Lightning-Ready service partner apps available today on the AppExchange, the world’s largest business app marketplace.

Lightning Service Console, the unified desktop experience for customer service agents, includes several new capabilities to maximize productivity and speed so agents can provide better customer experiences and resolve cases faster.

• Case Kanban provides a visual dashboard of cases in queue so agents can more efficiently triage cases and prioritize their time.
• Community Agent 360 gives the agent useful context, surfacing a customer’s community history and showing if the customer recently viewed or created content, such as a reading a community article or posting a comment.
• Federated Search helps an agent quickly find records across Salesforce and external data sources such as Confluence, YouTube, Dropbox and Box.
• Macro Builder lets agents quickly create reusable macros for specific customer service scenarios that agents can easily deploy if the issue arises again.

Service Cloud Mobile app for iOS and Android empowers agents to provide personalized customer service from anywhere. With the new native mobile app, employees can triage, manage and resolve cases while in meetings or on-the-go. Push notifications help keep agents up-to-date on the status of their cases, making it easier for them to provide customers with fast, responsive service.

To learn more about the next generation of Service Cloud, please visit www.servicecloud.com or try it out for free here.