Service Cloud Setup

What I Did

I worked with one other product designer on this project, ideating on potential solutions and designing high-fidelity mockups for an executive presentation. I worked collaboratively with Product Management and Engineering to execute on the design.

What is Service Cloud?

Service Cloud allows service agents to quickly respond to customer needs. A company can connect Service Cloud to multiple communication channels that they have opened up to customers and respond to those questions all in one place. A few of the most common channels that our customers build with and connect to Service Cloud are support emails, chat bots, and service phone numbers.

Understanding the Problem

The goal was to make it as easy and fast as possible for an admin to setup their Service organization so that service agents could begin answering customer requests.

My teammate and I were pulled in at the beginning of a new release cycle and had to get up to speed quickly.

The problem: the setup experience was not meeting our users needs for two main reasons:

Incredibly Complex: setting up something as simple as a support email requires dozens of steps when our competitors can do the same with just one click.
No Guidance: customers receive a blank organization without any recommendations or best practices to help get started. Admins feel like they are flying blind.

The persona: Salesforce administrators whose job it is to setup and optimize Salesforce for end users. This persona is tricky because admins range from very technical and experienced to “begrudgingly” taking on the role because no one else in the company would take it on.

Heuristic Evaluation

I started with a heuristic evaluation of the setup experience.

Opportunities Identified

Include more default features that don’t require any set up at all
New Admin home that is prescriptive and provides a more holistic setup experience
Prescriptive Walkthroughs in the product to educate and guide
Repurpose existing setup wizards but improve discoverability

Competitive Analysis

Competitors in the space were doing a really good job of providing seamless setup so service agents could start responding to customer questions immediately.

I did a competitive analysis of the biggest competitors. Some of my key takeaways from Zendesk and Freshdesk, the two bigger players in the space, are below.

Zendesk Key Takeaways

Clear and prescriptive guidance on what to setup and when
Almost everything comes default and out-of-the-box so the user can start playing with a sample ticket immediately. For comparison, in Service Cloud, the user has to setup many things taking many steps before they can access a case.

Freshdesk Key Takeaway

Setup experience is very clear and prescriptive. No ambiguity around what should be set up when and even how long the entire process is going to take.

Brainstorming and Initial Mocks

The setup experience in Service Cloud is complicated so I tried to map out each of the steps to make sense of them.

With all of the steps laid out, we tried to simplify these steps and broke them up into 3 categories.

Capture required information upfront, but only what is absolutely necessary to have a working service organization. This includes the service email and the domain name of the service organization.
Start a product walkthrough to familiarize them with the basics.
Bring the admin back to setup to customize and refine the organization further like setting up more channels or adding more users.

We brought this idea to life with some low-fidelity mocks, one of which you can see to the right.

Collaborating with Product Managers

In sharing our initial thinking with our Product Managers, the feedback we received was that we were missing the piece when we show the admin everything that we have setup by default for them. A huge amount of work would be going into providing features out of the box and this would be straying far from the current setup experience in Service Cloud.

While digging into this feedback in conversations with our product managers, it was beginning to look like a list of features and didn’t seem to be serving a purpose outside of just being informative.

Reframe the Problem and Realign

We chose to present our vision for the setup experience to executives in just over a week. This worked well to align product managers and designers on the problem we are solving and the story we wanted to tell. Took this opportunity to reframe in the Jobs to Be Done to stay out of the trap of focusing too much on features.

Admin’s primary and most immediate job to be done: set up the service organization as quickly as possible to that agents can provide service to customers.

Secondary: maintain that the service organization and optimize based on customer service metrics.

With this framework it became clear that admins don’t need to know all of the features that have been set up for them. It would be a distraction and take away from getting agents into the organization and providing service to customers as quickly as possible.