Service Cloud

Success with Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a valuable module for any organization that needs to deliver excellent service levels to a customer base where they want to sustain a long-running relationship.  Customer Service teams use Service Cloud to access information – both general about your products or specifically about the customer’s purchased services – rapidly in order to answer their questions, troubleshoot their issues, and schedule follow-up investigations, service visits or repairs when necessary.

West Coast Consulting Group has assembled a list of the Top 10 items to consider when planning your Service Cloud deployment.

      1. Create a single point of contact. When going live, the level of activity and emotion tends to run high and things can be chaotic if there are too many points of contact. Having a designated single point of contact from the customer team minimizes noise and confusion and makes the cut-over go much more smoothly.
      2. Ensure Tier 1 Customer Support readiness. Tier 1 Customer Support, every company’s first point of contact with customers, needs to be well prepared for the new system and should enter all cases in parallel one week prior to go-live. Be prepared for Day 1 so that your customers don’t experience delays in service because your Tier 1 support team hasn’t been trained to property raise and manage tickets.
      3. Test Email-to-Case connectivity. Test and ensure that your support team’s email is set up as system admin and associate it with Email2Case processes to ensure cases are routed correctly and responses from the customer are routed back to the cases. In order to ensure that it works prior to go-live, make the switch a few hours ahead of time  and test out this important functionality using communications to the real support email address from a simulated external customer’s email address.
      4. Enable all support users at least one week in advance. Ensure that all your support team’s users are fully operational within the Service Cloud environment at least one week prior to go-live and all access issues are addressed. Test login credentials, access levels, communications, escalation protocols, and don’t forget negative test cases to ensure they don’t have access to data, fields or tabs that they shouldn’t.

    (more…)

Ease Your Path to Salesforce Lightning

Long-time users of Salesforce rightfully have been leery of migrating from the original user interface, called Classic, to a new user interface called Lightning.  Launched in 2015, Lightning is a modern user interface that facilitates customization without code, enables a consistent, responsive experience across devices from PC to tablet to mobile, and makes it easy to connect a growing number of apps into the Salesforce interface for seamless user operations. Lightning is different from Classic in significant ways, and therefore needs to be approached with intent.

The West Coast Consulting Group team has worked with customers in every stage of Lightning adoption: from new Salesforce deployments over the past few years that started with Lightning and optimized their processes with Lightning-only capabilities, to long-time Classic users who have gone through the upgrade, to organizations for whom the time is not right to migrate from Classic but are working with us to develop their plan. We want to share the benefits of our customers’ experiences with you. (more…)

Digital workflows enables city to govern effectively

working from home

You’ve probably seen this digital transformation meme:

It’s funny because it’s true: the current pandemic and associated social distancing lockdown has served as the most compelling event imaginable to accelerate how many of us have transitioned to working virtually.

Even industry sectors that have long been perceived as the most resistant to change, including the public sector, have stepped up to the “new normal,” and are taking advantage of cloud applications to perform their business digitally. (more…)

West Coast Consulting Among CIO Applications’ Top 25 Solutions Providers for Salesforce Customers

The West Coast Consulting team is honored to have been included in CIO Applications’ 2019 list of the Top 25 solutions providers for Salesforce customers.  The main reason the WCG team has been included in this list is our ongoing commitment to innovation, and not just for the sake of innovating.  We bring our combined expertise in business process design and the Salesforce solution set to creating client environments that deliver measurable value in greater efficiencies, faster and more accurate processes, and expanded revenue streams.

The CIO team did a great job writing up some of our relevant experiences, and you can read more about it here.

#Awards #Certifications #Salesforce #SalesCloud # ServiceCloud

20 Years of Salesforce, 15 years of West Coast Consulting Group!

It’s been a lot of fun to follow the media coverage of Salesforce, describing the incredible achievements of Marc Benioff and Parker Harris and the entire team over the past twenty years.  One of our favorite photos was in the San Francisco Chronicle of Mark and Parker outside of Mama’s Cafe in North Beach.  One of the West Coast Consulting Group team’s favorite spots is just across the street at the Liguria Bakery, where we try to show up early to get our focaccia before they sell out!  It’s interesting to think about how all three of these things – Mama’s, Liguria Bakery and Salesforce – are San Francisco institutions, and on the 20th anniversary of Salesforce we thought about what this particular institution, that today reaches all parts of the globe, means to us.

2004: What a Year!
West Coast Consulting Group started in 2004, a bunch of enterprise software and business process optimization specialists from large tech firms and systems integrators coming together to bring our expertise to Silicon Valley companies.  Our mission was to codify their processes in software.  And one day we were standing outside of our SoMa offices and a taxi drove by with an ad with that now-iconic cloud logo and the tagline “No Software.”  What was this?!  We immediately investigated, had our first meeting with the Salesforce team and from that point, there was no looking back.

Our team was one of the first teams trained, certified and gainfully employed to deliver Salesforce implementations back in the day when the Salesforce platform was essentially only what SalesCloud is today.  We were among the first 500 to be certified, and we have a plaque to prove it! (more…)

Go to Top