Salesforce has followed up the successful release of Sales Cloud Essentials with the new Service Cloud Essentials.
The new offering from the leading business CRM platform is a natural, especially for the small businesses it’s built for — where Sales Cloud Essentials helps your sales team get new clients and customers into your company’s funnel, Service Cloud Essentials helps your team support those customers.
Marie Rosecrans, Senior Vice President of small business marketing at Salesforce, told Small Business Trends in a recent interview, the goal of Salesforce Essentials is simple. It’s designed to help you “find, win, and keep customers,” she said. “From the minute they enter your funnel as a lead through when those customers need support, we are able to help our customers do just that.”
“We have learned a lot about small business users want,” Rosecrans added. “People that currently use spreadsheets, email inboxes need a better way to run their businesses and they need it to be super simple. They’re resource constrained and time-constrained. Oftentimes small businesses are so consumed with the day-to-day demands of of working in their business that they don’t set aside the time to work on their business.”
Service Cloud Essentials helps small businesses help customers after they’ve been brought into their fold, as it were. It’s one thing to get a customer on the books. It’s a totally different matter when it comes to your small business following up with those customers.
Proper follow-up can lead to future business and gives those customers less reason to find another company. Service Cloud is built on the Salesforce platform and comes pre-loaded with some of the top integrated apps that help your small business extend the platform.
Rather than looking in umpteen different places for customer information when you’re following up with them on a service call, Service Cloud Essentials gives you all that information in one place.
Service Cloud Essentials is ideal for small businesses where the service person is different than the sales person but Rosecrans understands that that is often the same person with smaller companies.
“One thing that small businesses struggle with today is that they don’t have all their customer information in a centralized place,” Rosecrans said. “If it’s sitting in an email or a spreadsheet, that data is disparate and prevents you from supporting your customer. Salesforce Essentials helps you bring your data together in one place so you can use it to deliver more personalized experiences.
“We have optimized Service Cloud solution for small businesses. In small business, the person supporting the customer may have sold to that customer. People are wearing multiple hats.”
Service Cloud Essentials adds to a small business’s firepower when it comes to helping their customers. It gives anyone that’s working on an account all the information they’ll need to help a customer and provide top quality service.
Customer experience is more important than product and price. It’s more important for small business to create a better experience,” Rosecrans said. “You know all of the activities that it took to get them to purchase, what support cases they’ve logged. Think about the power of having that information at your fingertips.”
Technology Gap
One of the biggest problems small businesses face with new technology is implementing it. And after implementing it, getting members of the team to use the tech properly is a challenge on its own.
Salesforce addresses that big challenge with Trailhead. And Trailhead is baked into Service Cloud Essentials. Trailhead is a “fun, interactive way of learning Salesforce.” Trailhead has walk-thrus and coaching tutorials for anyone at a small business to view and learn.
Salesforce is giving a 30-day free trial of its Essentials platform for small businesses.
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