All the experts agree, thriving in the current marketplace means learning how to deliver the best experiences to your target customer. The biggest challenge for business leaders is figuring out how to do this effectively. Fortunately, there are technology solutions available to help.
Systems for managing service and customer experience make it easier to keep track of the customer journey, and the steps your business is taking to reduce buyer pain points. In the service software market today, there are a number of popular providers offering effective software solutions, including Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
Salesforce is the all-in-one customer relationship management and sales solution popular all around the globe today. Alternatively, ServiceNow is a convenient, easy-to-use, and reliable ecosystem of tools for delighting the average customer. Here’s what you need to know about each solution.
→ UPDATE - A 2025 comparison of these platforms is now available here.
Salesforce Service Cloud Features
Salesforce has a comprehensive range of tools and software solutions to offer the modern business owner. The “Service Cloud” environment is the solution from Salesforce built specifically to empower service agents and strengthen the customer experience. With the Service Cloud, Salesforce ensures agents have a unified, accessible view of every customer interaction, as well as powerful productivity tools to help them excel.
Built to improve customer engagement and agent experiences at the same time, the Service Cloud paves the way for exceptional, industry-leading support. The recent acquisition of Slack also means Salesforce can offer a comprehensive environment for team collaboration. Features include:
- Native Slack integration
- Salesforce Einstein for useful insights
- Lightning service console with productivity tools
- 360-degree views of every customer
- Case management with streamlined workflows
- Full contextual history of customer conversations
- All-in-one knowledgebase
- Service processes and automation with Lightning Flow
- Omni-channel routing for smarter service
- Service analytics with AI-powered Insights
- Predictive analytics
- Macros for automation
- Call center management and CTI integrations
- Asset and order management tools
- Extensive learning tools
Companies accessing the Salesforce Service Cloud can communicate with customers on any channel, and build the crucial workflows required to help conversations flow more smoothly in the modern workforce. With smart productivity tools, employees and supervisors can enhance team performance, and AI insights pave the way to better decision-making strategies too.
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
Highly regarded as one of the better tools for managing the service workflow, ServiceNow improves service operations and opens the door to amazing customer engagements. With this cloud-based environment, business leaders can develop digital workflows, connect the back, front and middle offices, and align teams on collaborative strategies.
Like the Salesforce Service Cloud solution, ServiceNow’s Customer Service Management offering is available either as a standalone tool or in conjunction with other ServiceNow tools for IT and employee workflow management. The ecosystem comes enhanced with artificial intelligence and is ready to scale to suit any style of business. Features include:
- Simple back-end connectivity for teams
- Self-service functionality
- Automation for service strategies
- Intelligent routing for help tickets and tasks
- Case management with SLAs
- Agent workspace for agent productivity
- Omni-channel customer conversations
- Centralised customer portfolios
- Advanced automatic work routing
- Customer service playbooks
- Guided decisions with best action recommendations
- Predictive intelligence with machine learning
- Workforce optimisation and scheduling
- Process optimisation
- Engagement messenger
- Knowledge management
- Customer communities and forums
- Virtual agents
- Field service management
- Visual workflow management
- Proactive customer experience services
- Industry data models
- Service management for issue resolution
- Extensive customer project management
The ServiceNow rich feature set combines everything teams need to offer a competitive level of customer care. You’ll have access to extensive reports and dashboards, as well as performance analytics for tracking areas where your company needs to improve. There are also mobile apps for your agents on the move, surveys for measuring the voice of the customer, and comprehensive issue tracking.
Salesforce Service Cloud vs ServiceNow: Which is Best?
Choosing the ideal tool for managing the customer service journeys in your business can be a complex process. Many of the market-leading providers available today offer a host of overlapping features. For instance, with both Salesforce and Zendesk, companies can access comprehensive case management tools and centralised views of the customer.