How to Pass Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Certification Exam

Last Updated on September 9, 2023 by Rakesh Gupta

It has been more than nine years since I passed the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant exam. In the past few months, many people reached out to me asking for guidance and a path to becoming a certified Service Cloud Consultant. 

That gives me an idea for writing a blog post on this topic. For by reading from the beginning to the end of this article, you will have a clear understanding of – and will be able to devise a plan and a strategy for – how to pass the Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant certification exam.

👉 As you are here, you may want to check out the How to Pass Sales Cloud Consultant Certification Exam article.

So, Who is an Ideal Candidate for the Exam?

A Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant designs and deploys solutions that support customer business processes and requirements using Salesforce applications. The consultant has experience designing solutions using the Service Cloud functionality and can lead the implementation of these solutions within a customer organization. The consultant has both contact center industry experience and expertise in Salesforce applications including the knowledge needed to implement multiple applications in common customer scenarios.

Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultants are interested in demonstrating their expertise as cloud computing implementation consultants with a specialty in the contact center domain. The Salesforce Certified Consultant has 2 to 5 years of experience as a senior business analyst and has developed the skills outlined below:

• Experience managing implementation projects
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Deep knowledge of Salesforce product lines
• Solid understanding of internet technologies and cloud computing
• Solid understanding of data management and database concepts
• Familiarity with the software development lifecycle
• Ability to:  
  • Design and implement successful solutions
  • Anticipate and mitigate risk
  • Meet and manage customer expectations
  • Increase customer confidence
  • Consistently deliver effective business solutions
  • Manage solution delivery and any issues that arise
  • Build solutions that are scalable and maintainable
  • Set up change management practices to ensure long-term solution success
  • Troubleshoot and resolve issues
  • Prioritize and escalate customer issues

How to prepare for the exam?

Learning styles differ widely – so there is no magic formula that one can follow to clear an exam. The best practice is to study for a few hours daily – rain or shine! Below are some details about the exam and study materials:

• Prerequisite: Salesforce Administrator credential
• 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions and 5 non-scored questions* – 105 mins
• 67% is the passing score
• Exam Sections and Weighting
  • Industry Knowledge: 10%
  • Implementation Strategies: 15%
  • Service Cloud Solution Design: 16%
  • Knowledge Management: 9%
  • Interaction Channels: 10%
  • Case Management: 15%
  • Contact Center Analytics: 5%
  • Integration and Data Management: 5%
  • Service Console: 15%
• The exam Fee is $200 plus applicable taxes
• Retake fee: $100
• Schedule your certification exam here

The following list is not exhaustive; so check it out and use it as a starting point:

1. Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant Exam Guide
2. Trailmix: Prepare for Your Salesforce Service Cloud Consultant Credential
3. Superbadges
   1. App Customization Specialist
   2. Lightning Implementation Specialist
   3. Service Cloud Specialist

What you Need to Know to Smoothen your Journey

On a very high level, you have to understand the following topics to clear the exam. All credit goes to the Salesforce Trailhead team and their respective owners.

1. A few tips for the successfully crack the exam:
   1. Read the question carefully.  This is one of the wordier exams that I can remember, and if you skim read it’s easy to misunderstand the scenario.  More than once over the years I’ve caught myself choosing the option that was 100% wrong and only picking this up during a review of the questions.
   2. Some of the potential answers are flat out wrong, so even if you aren’t sure of the correct answer, it may be possible to eliminate the impossible.  And as Sherlock Holmes said, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
   3. I find it useful to note down questions that I’m not sure about with a percentage confidence. This allows me to work out how I’m doing against the pass mark and not feel bad if I’ve got a couple of total guesses in there!
2. Sign up for Expert Coaching Sessions for Service Cloud ^{By Salesforce}
   1. How To: Service Cloud: Set Up Entitlements & Milestones ^{Session Recording}
   2. How to: Service Cloud: Automate Your Case Management ^{Session Recording}
   3. How To: Service Cloud: Design Your Lightning Console ^{Session Recording}
   4. How To: Service Cloud: Automate Work Distribution With Omni-Channel ^{Session Recording}
   5. How To: Service Cloud: Einstein Bots NLP Tuning ^{Session Recording}
   6. How To: Service Cloud: Import External Content in Lightning Knowledge ^{Session Recording}
   7. How To: Service Cloud: Plan Salesforce Knowledge in Lightning ^PDF
   8. Getting Started: Service Cloud: Service Cloud Einstein ^{Session Recording}
   9. Getting Started: Service Cloud: Slack for Service ^{Session Recording}
   10. Getting Started: Service Cloud: Messaging for Web and In-App ^{Session Recording}
   11. Getting Started: Service Cloud: KCS in Lightning ^PDF
   12. Getting Started: Service Cloud: Einstein Bots ^{Session Recording}
   13. Getting Started: Service Cloud: Digital Engagement ^{Session Recording}
   14. Getting Started: Service Cloud: Voice ^PDF
3. Industry Knowledge: 10%
   1. Service Cloud is an easy-to-use customer service application that can help you provide and track excellent service. It keeps your customers happy and your support team sane, whether your customers contact you by email, phone, social media, or other channels from desktops, mobile devices, or apps.
   2. Features of Service Cloud
      1. Service Console – At the heart of Service Cloud is the Service Console. The console is a help desk that lets anyone on your service team (or anyone at your company) see a personalized view of each customer and their case.
      2. Case Management – A case is a customizable record in Salesforce that tracks and describes a customer issue, complaint, request—you name it. All unifying information about a customer is stored on a case, including account, contact, product, and history data so that anyone on your service team can jump in to help.
      3. Channels & Digital Engagement – Whether the case arrived by email, phone call, web chat, social media, or text message, a support agent can quickly respond to it from the console. Agents can track any useful information and engage with customers on their favorite channels, devices, or apps to provide a great service experience.
      4. Automatic Workflows – When a case arrives, its information is automatically assessed and routed to the right people to match any custom workflows set up for your team. Notifications keep your service team on track before they miss any key items, required responses, or service agreements.
      5. Knowledge Base – Find, share, and store articles or answers related to cases to speed up service. Or, let customers find answers on their own from your self-service help centers or portals.
      6. Instant Metrics – Information about cases is available in service metrics to gauge your business’s response times, resolution times, and overall service health. Use data to identify strengths and gaps; and decide how to deliver better, faster service.
      7. Mobile & Field Service Ready – Since Service Cloud is part of the Salesforce platform, all of your business data, customized processes, and unique workflows come together in one simple place. You can even see it all on your mobile phone or tablet out in the field.
      8. Service for Everyone – Salesforce is committed to providing accessible products for all individuals — including your service team members working with assistive technology, such as speech recognition software and screen readers. Accessibility isn’t a special feature; it’s universally designed into features for Service Cloud.
   3. Benefits of the Service Console
      

      Benefit	Description
      (1) Split views	From the start, you can see a list of cases alongside your workspace to quickly work through incoming customer issues.
      (2) Related record and related list components	Right out of the box, you can see information related to a customer to get a well-rounded picture of their issue and who they are. Jump to lists of similar cases, and work off lists to keep your cases organized.
      (3) Highlights panel component	Without configuring a thing, spot exactly what you need front and center to respond to customers quickly.
      (4) Compact case feed	Understand case progression and case history at a glance with a news-like feed and preconfigured pages. Colorful icons help you distinguish between people and interactions instantly, and you can add a quick comment to help your customers or team.
      (5) Knowledge component	See suggested articles from your knowledge base to solve cases faster, search articles to find exactly what you need, and attach common solutions from similar cases. (You must enable Lightning Knowledge first.)
      (6) Preconfigured utility bar	Increase productivity with tools, such as Notes to jot down things, or History to go back to recently viewed records.

   4. Summarize the key benefits of Service Setup.
      

      Benefit	Description
      (1) Guided setup flows	Follow a few simple prompts and your email and social channels are up and running, ready to turn customer issues into cases.
      (2) Service metrics	Glance at a dashboard to monitor your service performance and check on the health of your team and overall customer satisfaction.
      (3) Recommended setup	Discover simple steps to set up key features, learn more about Service Cloud, and get plugged into the Salesforce community.
      (4) Setup tree	Explore branches of the setup tree and check out all the features at your disposal. Not all Service Cloud–related setup nodes are exposed in the Service Setup tree—only the essentials—so click around to get to where you want to go.

   5. Automate Case Management with  case automation tools
      

      Queues	Automatically prioritize your support team’s workload by creating lists from which specific agents can jump in to solve certain types of cases.
      Assignment Rules	Automatically assign incoming cases to specific agents so that the right people work on the right cases.
      Escalation Rules	Automatically escalate cases to the right people when the cases aren’t solved by a certain time.
      Auto-Response Rules	Automatically send personalized email responses to customers based on each case’s details.

   6. Other case management tools that one can use
      

      Page Layout Editor	Customize a case page’s contents, like the fields and buttons that appear on the page, along with what is visible to whom. Additionally, customize the structure of the page, and the position of its components, with the Lightning App Builder.
      Email Templates	Create email templates to save time and standardize communications sent to customers from cases. Automate information on emails with merge fields. Templates are automatically available to anyone in the org.
      Entitlement Management	Provide the correct level of support for customers. Define, enforce, and track service agreements and service contracts as part of an overall support management process.
      Omni-Channel	Manage support agents’ priorities and their capacity to take on work items so that they’re given only the number of assignments that they can handle. Route all assignments to the correct agents so that they no longer have to choose work assignments manually from a queue.
      Macros	Help support agents automatically complete repetitive tasks on cases, such as selecting the right email templates, so that they can spend time doing more important things.
      Quick Text	Create predefined messages for support agents, like greetings, answers to common questions, and short notes to insert in cases, emails, web chats, and more. Save time and standardize on messaging to customers.
      Utilities	Give support agents quick access to productivity tools, like notes, history, softphones, and more in the footer of the console.

   7. Digital engagement options with Service Cloud
      

      Voice, Call Center, and Open CTI	Boost phone productivity by integrating Salesforce with third-party computer-telephony integration (CTI) systems. See Salesforce data for incoming calls, make outgoing calls directly from the console, and report on call outcome, duration, and more.
      Self-Service Help Center	Help customers find answers, log cases, and update orders on their own from self-service web experiences. Customize, create, and brand help centers with easy-to-use templates, components, and apps.
      Social Customer Service	Help support agents listen, respond, and log cases for customers on social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. Use keywords, classifiers, and language detection to make sure that agents find the right posts and work the right issues.
      Chat & Embedded Service	Engage with customers browsing the web with real-time, live chat. Quickly embed unobtrusive chat capabilities on company websites for both desktop and mobile browsers to let customers chat with agents and deflect cases before they get logged.
      Snap-ins for Mobile & Visual Remote Assistant	Add service to mobile apps so that customers can get help from apps on phones and tablets. With an SDK (software development kit), developers can let customers create and manage cases, live chat with support agents, video chat and screen share with agents (Visual Remote Assistant), and view knowledge base articles on the go.
      Messaging	Engage with customers using messaging apps like SMS text and Facebook Messenger, so that they can connect with support agents instantly from anywhere. Help agents manage multiple text conversations at once and see each text alongside relevant Salesforce data.
      Field Service	Support onsite visits out in the field with mobile solutions like job schedules, van inventory, and more—with or without web connections.

   8. When you’re a manager and you get feedback from an executive, you know exactly what to do next because someone has told you what to do. Now that you’re in charge of the contact center, you’re expected to create that direction for yourself and your team. The best way to establish direction for your team is through prioritization. One of the new challenges you’re facing is having to tell people what you’re not going to do. You have to avoid things that distract you from your goals and be comfortable saying “no.” Setting limits ensures that your team stays focused. 
   9. When you think about customer care and customer service, many of the challenges in the contact center are the result of outdated policies and inflexible culture. You have to be aware of the challenge this presents, especially when you’re new and you’re trying to improve things. To build a culture of continuous improvement, you have to make sure that you blame the process, not the people, when things go wrong.
   10. As the leader of the contact center, here are some insights you should regularly provide to the C-Suite:
       1. Information on the latest technology
       2. Reports on up-time and complaints from customers
       3. Financials around sales and revenue
       4. Earnings before tax (where and what those earnings are coming from)
       5. Costs
       6. Profit and margin
       7. How sales turn into real dollars
       8. Up-time reports
       9. Complaint logs
4. Implementation Strategies: 15%
   1. Now your agents can respond in real-time to any customer, anywhere.
      1. Phone
      2. Text/SMS
      3. Email
      4. Websites
      5. Chat
      6. Mobile apps
      7. Social Media
      8. Self-service site
      9. Two-way video chat
   2. With the Lightning Service Console, everything an agent needs is right at their fingertips so that they can deliver:
      1. Faster service: Rapidly work through any backlog of cases with tools that eliminate clicks and let agents take care of customers quickly, increase customer satisfaction levels, and stay motivated by feeling agile and productive.
      2. Smarter service: Agents can be proactive service gurus, address inefficiencies before they happen, and feel empowered with the right information to make more informed decisions that help build lasting customer relationships.
      3. Personalized service: 68% of consumers say it’s very important for service agents to know their full history. Regardless of channel, your agents can always know everything about your customer. Whether it’s past issues, purchase history, or data from a backend system, everything’s all in one place.
   3. With Service Cloud, you can create a single, branded Experience Cloud site that your customers can access to find what they need, on any device, anywhere they go. This frees agents to spend more time working on the toughest cases.
   4. Salesforce Experience Cloud sites integrate with Service Cloud. Customers can create cases manually, agents can escalate customer questions to cases, and managers can set workflows to escalate cases if a question hasn’t been answered.
   5. Best Practices for Omnichannel Call Center Success
      1. Customer service is a team sport:
         1. Ensure that everyone in your service organization, from agents to your management team, thoroughly understands your top 10 basic customer expectations.
         2. Be sure to post them prominently.
      2. Don’t guess what customers want. Go straight to the source: the customer.
         1. Create services based on what customers really expect.
         2. Then listen to customer interactions with agents and social channels. Take frequent and detailed surveys to get insight on how you’re meeting the team’s 10 expectations.
      3. Exceed expectations.
         1. Transform your call center now to get a jump-start on the future.
      4. Build cross-functional teams.
         1. Make customer service a team sport by serving customers across your organization.
         2. Use your company’s combined information, support, processes, products, and services to meet and exceed customer expectations.
      5. Let your customers guide your strategy.
         1. Ensure that the evolving customer expectations are central to how you approach your customer relationships.
         2. Enable your customers to drive everything, including segmentation, the channels you make available, service-level objectives, your hours of operation, and more.
   6. Most important qualities to look for in every expert in customer service and hiring excellent candidates.
      1. Technical knowledge: They have a solid understanding for the industry and basic resolution skills.
      2. Ability to multitask: They must thrive in a hectic environment and be able to jump from one issue to another quickly.
      3. Pleasant phone etiquette: Candidates must have the ability to engage with customers in a pleasant manner and be able to hold a fluid conversation.
      4. Ability to stay calm, cool, and collected: They’re able to remain calm and resourceful in any situation, regardless of the circumstances.
      5. Ability to focus: They have the ability to stay present and focused on delivering the best possible service to each and every customer.
      6. Solution-oriented thinkers: They display a high level of confidence and a propensity to search for a resolution themselves or direct their customers to the appropriate personnel who can provide an answer.
      7. Ability to listen and put the customer first: They can use empathy and patience to ensure customers feel catered to and confident that the support representative is hearing their issue and is knowledgeable in the subject matter.
   7. Your implementation team is important because they help you drive success as you plan, implement, and roll out Service Cloud. They ensure that work gets prioritized correctly, is meaningful to the business, and offers positive change for your service team.
      

      Key Player	Role
      Executive sponsor	The person who prioritizes and approves how your team spends their time in Service Cloud
      Service Operations Manager (or equivalent)	The expert on your day-to-day service and support processes
      End user	A team member who has time to test Service Cloud and give feedback
      Admin	The person who makes changes in Service Cloud and manages the implementation (this might be you!)

   8. Once you outline your business goals, the next step is to match these goals with how you’ll measure success. As you finalize your success metrics, make sure they’re SMART.
      1. Specific
      2. Measurable
      3. Achievable
      4. Relevant
      5. Time-bound
   9. Before you start setting up Service Cloud, take full account of your existing service processes.
      1. Gather any existing Service process documentation.
      2. Identify where your processes need more definition.
      3. Articulate how your business works best and fill the gaps.
   10. Organize customer-centric discovery into these four steps.
       

       Customer-Centric Discovery Step	What You Do in This Step
       Know Your Customer	Get to know your customer’s industry and business.
       Be Your Customer	Take a walk in your customer’s shoes.
       Connect with Your Customer	Share your insights with your customer.
       Create with Your Customer	Develop a strategy with your customer.

   11. Take a step closer and start to analyze your customer’s business directly so you can understand more about their:
       1. Goals—what they want to achieve.
       2. Values—what their guiding principles are internally and with their consumers.
       3. Initiatives—what they do now to achieve their goals.
       4. Strategies—what they plan to do to achieve their goals.
       5. Obstacles—what problems they face as they work to achieve their goals.
   12. Empathy takes some practice to do it well, although the concepts are pretty straightforward. Here’s how you do it:
       1. Identify common ground. Find something your customer does that’s relatable for you.
       2. Develop a genuine interest in your customer’s business. Take that relatable idea and figure out how you might feel if you were involved in the story. Imagine you’re the customer or an employee, for example.
       3. Look for shared experiences. Think about how you can respond in a way that makes sense to your customer. Start to think about how you’ve solved problems like theirs in the past.
   13. In step three of customer-centric discovery, Connect with Your Customer, you prepare for your customer meeting, confirm and sharpen your insights with your customer, and organize and visualize your insights through the process of whiteboarding.
5. Service Cloud Solution Design: 16%
   1. Service Cloud Embedded Service for Mobile Apps are a set of tools that help you inject Service Cloud platform features into your existing iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android apps.
   2. Embedded Service for Mobile Apps aren’t separate products or stand-alone apps, they’re part of a software development kit (SDK) that is powered by the Service Cloud platform. You can use Embedded Service for Mobile Apps to add features like Knowledge and Live Agent (chat) to your mobile app.
   3. Self-service solution should be much more than a place where customers try to troubleshoot problems on their own. It should be more useful than a beefed-up FAQ page. It should and can be:
      1. A gathering place for your customers to help themselves and act as subject matter experts to help one another.
      2. An account portal where customers can instantly access information they need.
      3. A support hub to engage with agents, ask questions, and get guided help.
   4. Two ways that your company can benefit from a customer site.
      1. Boost Customer Satisfaction: Sites let you make more information available to customers, so they don’t have to go through the process of contacting a support agent to deal with routine requests, such as resetting a password or checking on their account balance. They can do these types of things themselves quickly and easily, right in the site.
      2. Decrease Call Volume: By using a customer site to deflect some of the more mundane service inquiries, companies can drastically reduce the number of incoming calls their agents receive. Agents are not only taking fewer calls, but can focus their time and energy on more difficult and complex customer issues that may require more agent attention.
   5. Features & Benefits of Salesforce Flow for Service
      

      Feature	Description	Great For
      Guide workers with a step-by-step list	When workers open a record, they see a list of steps in the component. Selecting a step launches a flow, for example, that guides them through the task at hand.	Reducing guesswork Reinforcing training Easing handoffs Standardizing procedures
      Create default lists for channels	The admin can set up a default list of actions for different touchpoints, such as phone and chat.	Customizing a default list for each channel Supporting Chat and CTI
      Set up actions at the top or bottom of the list	You can configure steps in pinned regions at the list top or bottom, so users know to do those steps first or last. There’s also an unpinned region for other steps.	Highlighting first and last steps Letting users choose from common steps
      Find another action	When a user doesn’t see a step that they need, they can find a different one. The admin defines a subset of actions that are available.	Adding steps based on customer needs Finding the right action fast
      View the history of guided actions	On the History tab, agents see which actions have been started, paused, resumed, and completed, when, and by whom.	Simplifying handoffs Letting users and supervisors grasp status quickly
      Mark actions as mandatory	You can mark actions, such as those required for safety or compliance, as important. When users close a mandatory action, they see a reminder to complete it.	Helping agents complete critical steps Increasing compliance with safety, regulatory, and other goals
      Show paused flows	Sometimes an agent or customer is missing information and can’t complete a flow. A process automation setting lets your users pause flows. The component shows all paused flows for the current record. When a variable with the flow’s record context is updated, the component shows the paused flow on that record. (The record context might be changed, for example, when a lead is converted to a contact.)	Helping agents locate and resume paused flows Completing procedures more quickly
      Display recommendations from Einstein Next Best Action	Action strategies filter recommendations into personalized actions and offers, such as a discount, a repair, or an add-on service. The component shows the top recommendations for the record.	Customizing actions and offers for agents and customers Presenting the best next steps

   6. A RecordAction is simply an action, such as a flow or quick action, that’s associated with a record. For example, if an agent clicks a step called Verify Information on a Contact record, a screen flow walks the agent through the task of confirming the customer’s identity. In this example, the RecordAction associates the Verify Information flow with the Contact record.
   7. Salesforce Flow for Service brings together guidance and automation tools. It’s built on Salesforce Flow, the product that provides point-and-click automation tools like Flow Builder.
   8. Before you can create RecordActions, create the flows and quick actions that you can associate with records.
      1. Use Flow Builder to create flows, such as screen flows, field service mobile flows, or autolaunched flows.
      2. Create custom quick actions, or use predefined quick actions like Email and Log a Call. Add the quick actions that you want to use to record page layouts.
   9. When to Use Deployment or Flow Builder?
      1. There are two ways to create RecordActions. You can configure them in an Actions & Recommendations deployment, or create a flow process with RecordActions in Flow Builder. Both methods can invoke screen flows, field service mobile flows, and quick actions.
         

         Use a Deployment When	Use Flow Builder When
         You have a straightforward use case. A deployment lets you quickly configure a to-do list for your agents.	Your use case is more complex. For example, you want control over which steps appear in the list and when they’re shown.
         You want to display the same list of steps on record pages.	A condition determines when you want to show the list. For example, you want to guide agents through a procedure when a trigger condition is met. The trigger can be an event such as creating a record or updating a record. For example, you want a list to display when there’s an escalation.
         You want to show default actions in the list for each channel, such as phone or chat.	You want to override default actions. The component displays channel defaults when there aren’t RecordActions to show from Flow Builder or APIs.
         You want to control the actions that users can start from the component. When users click Add on the component, they can find and launch another action from a subset that you configure.	When users click Add, they see flows and quick actions configured in the selected deployment. If you don’t select a deployment in component properties, users see an empty list when they click Add.
         You prefer to use Setup and a point-and-click interface to configure list settings and channel defaults.	You’re comfortable using Flow Builder and configuring more complex logic.

   10. In the game of field service, there are generally four players: administrators, agents, dispatchers, and mobile workers, or people who make service calls. Each one has a specific job to do to keep things up and running.
       

       Role	Description
       Administrator	Sets up field service features according to their unique business needs. Set up includes installing the Field Service managed package and Field Service mobile app.
       Agent	Takes customer service calls and requests field service appointments via work orders, which list the skills and parts that are needed.
       Dispatcher	Assigns and manages the service appointments. The dispatcher console included in the managed package helps dispatchers schedule, optimize, and dispatch service appointments from one screen.
       Mobile Worker or Technician	Manages their service appointments. Their tasks include closing work orders, tracking the parts they used, and providing service reports.

   11. Field Service has three main parts that work together to give you a complete field service management solution.
       1. Core Field Service features including Service and Dispatcher Consoles
       2. Scheduling and optimization from a managed package
       3. A mobile app for your mobile workforce
   12. Field Service core features

       Feature	Description
       Related to workers
       Service Resources	Mobile employees who can perform field service work
       Service Crews	Teams of service resources that are assigned to service appointments as a unit.
       Service Territories	Regions where field service work is performed
       Skills	Skills required to perform field service tasks
       Related to time
       Operating Hours	Times when field service work can be performed for service territories, service resources, and customer accounts. Operating hours are made up of time slots: a time period within a day when field service work can be completed.
       Time Sheets	Tools to track the time your field service employees are spending on tasks
       Shifts	Times that service resources can work. Shifts can extend operating hours so that you can create service availability outside of normal hours.
       Related to work
       Maintenance Plans	Plans that help you track preventive maintenance work using auto-generated work orders
       Product Items	Parts for services that can be requested, required, transferred, and consumed in field service work
       Product Requests	Requests for a part or parts
       Product Transfers	Transfers of inventory between locations.
       Return Orders	Records of inventory returns or repairs.
       Service Appointments	Appointments for field service work
       Service Report Templates	Templates for customer-facing reports summarizing the status of service appointment and work orders
       Work Orders	Requests for field service work
       Work Types	Templates for common field service work, such as cable installations or furnace repairs

   13. Field Service comes with a link to the managed package. The managed package provides a customizable schedule, real-time map, and dispatcher console so you can get the right tech to the right job at the right time.
       

       Core Field Service	Field Service Managed Package	Field Service Mobile App
       When you enable Field Service in your organization, admins and agents can: Set up availability, skill sets, and standard appointment requirements unique to your organization Enable the Salesforce app to provide mobile access to your mobile workforce Track inventory and van stock so your mobile workforce has what they need when they’re at a customer site Report and analyze field service data Plan, perform, and track all your field service work, from installations to repairs and maintenance	When the managed package is installed, dispatchers can: Optimize the schedule according to your organization’s scheduling policies Get a bird’s-eye view of appointment lists, scheduling actions, a resource availability chart, and an interactive map in the dispatcher console Integrate and maintain scheduling policies, global actions, sharing tools, and optimization rules with the administration app	The Field Service mobile app is available for free on the App Store and Google Play. Mobile workers using the app can: View their appointment schedule Use Salesforce data to check on work orders, reach contacts, and verify addresses Create and edit records to log work and create follow-up appointments Use Chatter to collaborate with other mobile workers, managers, and dispatchers Track updates with push notifications View Knowledge articles to complete tricky tasks Track van stock and inventory consumed to complete jobs

6. Knowledge Management: 9%
   1. Here are three common types of users and the permissions
      

      User	Description	Permissions Needed
      Readers only	Relatively new to the company, these agents aren’t authorized to create articles yet. They use existing articles to answer questions and attach articles to cases. These articles help them contribute much faster than if they had to solve all the issues themselves.	Read Knowledge permission
      Contributors	Advanced Knowledge users, such as Ada. They have a lot of product knowledge and understand the standards for articles. They create, edit, and publish articles.	Manage Article permission and Read, Create, Edit, and Publish Knowledge permissions.
      Knowledge admin	Knowledge admins know when to retire or delete articles.	Manage Article permission and Read, Create, Edit, Archive, Publish, and Delete Knowledge permissions.

   2. Lightning Knowledge Guide
   3. Define who sees an article.
      1. Visible in Internal App. Internal users see these articles. Other readers don’t. All published articles are visible in the internal app for agents and admins. 
      2. Visible to Customer. Authenticated users assigned a Customer profile see these articles. Customers can view articles by logging into a self-service site, so it’s important to set up their site correctly. 
      3. Visible to Partner. Authenticated users assigned a Partner profile see these articles. Customers don’t. Just like customer-visible articles, partner articles can appear in sites that partners log into. These articles contain information specific to partners.
      4. Visible in Public Knowledge Base. Readers see these articles without being authenticated. Ursa Major tags most FAQ articles as visible in the public knowledge base. 
   4. Salesforce search is powered by a search engine that brings users smart, relevant results automatically. You might be wondering how we determine which results to put at the top of the list. Here’s our secret sauce to find and rank the records users are looking for.
      1. Dash of search term frequency, order, and uniqueness
      2. Sprinkle of record activity
      3. Spoonful of access permissions
      4. Handful of other factors
   5. If auto-complete is enabled, suggestions appear as users type their queries. Just like a commonly used Internet search engine. It’s a quick way for users to find a record even before hitting the search results page.
      1. There are two flavors of auto-complete in Knowledge searches: for article or question titles and for keyword searches.
         1. Auto-complete for title searches presents users with the record they want and bypasses the search results page, saving valuable time. Search suggests up to three articles with titles matching the search term.
         2. Auto-complete for keyword searches helps users choose the right search terms when they don’t see the record that they want. Search suggests the three most popular keyword searches performed based on the search term and the channel’s Knowledge search activity. Out-of-order matching is supported. So, whether your users enter vanilla and chocolate swirl or chocolate and vanilla swirl, they get the right results.
7. Interaction Channels: 10%
   1. Top pain points the agents face
      

      So many clicks	Agents are getting click fatigue. Agents click records, fields, and buttons—the clicks seem never-ending.
      Less copy/paste	Agents are copying and pasting internal notes, email signatures, and other phrases that they use often. After pasting, agents still have to replace items, like the customer’s name and case number.
      Agents perform the same tasks on multiple cases	With all the cases about broken solar panels, agents are repeating the same actions on many cases. After the agent has verified the damage from a customer photo, they email the customer to apologize for the inconvenience, add internal case comments to note that the damage has been verified, then they send the case to a queue that’s authorized to send the replacement.
      Returning to records is difficult	Sometimes agents need to return to a specific record, but with the volume of records they work on, it’s too hard to remember a contact’s name or a specific case number. And switching between Recently Viewed list views for each object takes so many clicks.
      Status changes are tedious	The agents need an easier way to escalate cases that come in for broken solar panels.

   2. Productivity tools help users save time and work with records faster and more efficiently. The tools save clicks and valuable time, so folks can focus on the things that require more attention and analysis.
      

      Tool	Description	Great For
      Quick text	Quick text is a predefined message, like a greeting, note, phrase, or answer to a common question. Users can insert quick text in their emails, chats, and more. To insert quick text, users click a button or press a keyboard shortcut.	Standardization Replacement for copy/paste
      Macros	A macro is a set of instructions that tells the system how to complete a task. Users can run macros to complete repetitive tasks—selecting an email template, sending an email to a customer, updating the case status—all in a single click. When a user runs a macro, the system performs each instruction on the open record. Users run macros from the app’s utility bar.	Consistency Performing repetitive tasks
      History	The History utility lets users see their recently visited records. Users can see their subtabs in context of the workspace tabs they’ve visited and copy links without opening the record. Users access the history from the app’s utility bar.	Viewing a list of recent records Sharing links
      Mass quick actions	Mass quick actions let users edit up to 100 records from any list view, except for recently viewed lists. Users can only create and update records with mass quick actions.	Updating multiple records at the same time
      Split view	Split view lets users open list views while still viewing record details. Split view displays in a collapsible column, so users can go back to viewing just the record in one click. Users can open or close split view from the vertical bar on the left-hand side of the console.	Context switching
      Keyboard shortcuts	Keyboard shortcuts let users work and navigate faster, without a mouse. Users can use shortcuts to open and close utilities (like Macros and History), edit and save records, and more. Users can view the available shortcuts with the following commands. Windows: Ctrl+/ macOS: Cmd+/	Super users Accessibility needs
      Email templates	An email template is a predefined email. Depending on how you use it, users can customize the email before sending it, or it can be sent automatically as-is. You can automate information on emails with merge fields. Templates are automatically available to anyone in the org. You can insert email templates in: Email actions manually (in the publisher or global actions) Macros that include instructions for Email actions Predefined field values for the Email action Apex QuickActionDefaultsHandler interface	Standardization Automation
      Send email notifications	Various settings on the Support Settings page in Setup let you customize email notifications for users. You can set it up for agents to receive an email when the case owner changes and when case comments are added. Even contacts can receive email notifications when the case is created, updated, or comments are added.	Keeping agents and customers notified of updates
      Predefined field values for Quick Actions	Predefined field values let you prepopulate a quick action with default field values. For example, in the Email action, you can automatically include Cc and Bcc recipients, add an email template, or ensure that emails are associated with Salesforce records. Predefined field values can be real click-savers. You can create a custom action called Close Case that has the Status field preset to Closed but also includes the Internal Comment field. That way agents can leave a comment at the same time.	Consistency Automation

   3. Types of macros
      

      Regular macros	These macros perform actions that can be undone, meaning nothing is submitted, sent, or saved. For example, a macro that inserts an email template but doesn’t send the email is a regular macro.
      Irreversible macros	These macros perform actions that can’t be undone, such as sending emails to customers or updating a case’s status. These macros contain a Submit Action instruction that’s irreversible. There’s also a special permission that allows users to work with them. To create, edit, or run macros that contain irreversible actions, the user must have the Manage Macros Users Can’t Undo permission.Users without the Manage Macros Users Can’t Undo permission can still create and edit macros that don’t contain instructions for performing irreversible actions. Just make sure they have create and edit permission on the macro object itself.
      Bulk macros	These macros can run on multiple records at a time.

   4. Omni-Channel takes incoming work items and routes them to the most qualified, available support agents using the routing criteria that you define.
      

      Type of Routing	How It Works	Best Use Case
      Queue-based routing	You assign agents to queues, which typically represent a single skill.Omni-Channel assigns work items to a queue and then pushes work items to an agent who is a member of that queue. Works natively in Salesforce.	Best for smaller organizations that support a limited number of products.
      Skills-based routing	You assign skills to agents and required skills to work item types.Omni-Channel matches work items to agents who possess all the required skills. Works natively in Salesforce.	Best for larger organizations that: Have many agents that support many products. Support products that require complex skill sets. Support customers in many countries or across multiple languages.
      External routing	A third-party routing implementation of your choice routes work items through Omni-Channel to agents via the Salesforce Service Console.A developer uses APIs to integrate the partner routing application with Salesforce.	Best for organizations that want to route work to the Salesforce Service Console while keeping the routing implementation that the organization currently uses.

   5. Omni-Channel Supervisor supports both queue-based routing and skills-based routing. If you’re using queue-based routing, use the Agents, Queue Backlog, and Assigned Work tabs. If you’re using skills-based routing, use the Agents, Skills Backlog, and Assigned Work tabs. If you’re using both queue-based routing and skills-based routing, use all the tabs. The Queue Backlog tab is always displayed even when you only route with skills-based routing.
   6. Wherever you are in Omni-Channel Supervisor, there’s no refreshing required—the data updates automatically. Watch handle times tick by the second, and average wait times change as agents accept and close their work.
   7. Omni-Channel for Lightning Experience
   8. AI is the concept that we can program machines to think like humans. Examples of AI are popping up everywhere. If you’ve ever ordered anything using Alexa or asked Siri for a restaurant recommendation, you understand its benefits. AI isn’t a new concept—we’ve had the theoretical models for a long time—but it’s finally possible thanks to the availability of large amounts of data combined with the low cost of high-powered computing. 
   9. Brief overview of a few of the most important components of AI.
      1. Natural language understanding (NLU) refers to systems that handle communication between people and machines.
      2. Natural language processing (NLP) is distinct from NLU and describes a machine’s ability to understand what humans mean when they speak as they naturally would to another human.
      3. Named entity recognition (NER) labels sequences of words and picks out the important things like names, dates, and times. NER involves breaking apart a sentence into segments that a computer can understand and respond to quickly.
      4. Deep learning refers to artificial neural networks being developed between data points in large databases. Just like our human mind connects the dots to give us insights, deep learning uses algorithms to sift through data, draw conclusions, and enhance performance.
   10. Smarter Customer Service with Einstein
       1. Embedding Einstein into our product, to make it easier for any customer of any size across any industry to deploy AI and use it in their contact center, empowering you and your agents with the predictive intelligence you need to drive increased customer satisfaction. 
          1. Increase deflection and reduce handle time. Einstein Bots can resolve routine customer requests and seamlessly hand off the customer to an agent if an issue requires a human touch.
          2. Turbocharge agent productivity. Einstein Agent gives your agents intelligent, in-context suggestions, helping them do what they do best—help your customers.
          3. Rapid deployment and time-to-value. Service Cloud Einstein is preintegrated with Salesforce and your existing service channels, and comes with an out-of-the-box, intuitive user interface.
   11. Einstein helps you deliver a transformational customer service experience, and it’s built into your existing Service Cloud deployment. By using AI and machine learning—in real time—the following features make everyone in the contact center smarter and more effective.
       1. Einstein Bots automatically resolve top customer issues, collect qualified customer information, and seamlessly hand off the customers to agents, meaning increased case deflection in the contact center and reduced handle times for agents.
       2. Einstein Agent drives agent productivity across the contact center. Through intelligent case routing, automatic triaging, and case field prediction, Einstein Agent significantly accelerates issue resolution and enhances efficiency.
       3. Einstein Discovery helps managers take action with predictive service KPIs. By serving up real-time analysis of drivers that impact KPIs, like churn or CSAT and suggested recommendations and explanations, managers are empowered to make more strategic decisions for their business.
       4. Einstein Vision for Field Service automates image classification to resolve issues faster on-site. Just by taking a picture of the object, Einstein Vision can instantly identify the part, ensuring accuracy for the technician and boosting first-time fix rates.
       5. Einstein Language brings the power of deep learning to developers. They can use pretrained models to classify text by the sentiment as either positive, neutral, or negative, and then be able to classify the underlying intent in a body of text. Put it all together, and you have the ability to process language across unstructured data in any app.
   12. Well-designed chatbots express the following qualities
       1. Transparent. The chatbot should identify itself as a chatbot right up front. It should state what it can do and provide guidance via a pop-up menu of top customer requests.
       2. Personable. The chatbot should have a voice and tone that expresses the brand. This can be in the type of language or which emojis (if any) are used.
       3. Thorough. The chatbot should give the user complete information—and time to read it. Chatbots can also provide images to enhance the clarity of the information provided.
       4. Iterative. To address any issues that arise, chatbots should be continuously modified. Chatbots should improve their performance over time and not be thought of as a one-and-done kind of thing.
   13. Salesforce Mobile App Rollout
8. Case Management: 15%
   1. Record types determine the business processes, page layouts, and picklist values that support agents use. 
   2. An escalation rule automatically reroutes a case and can notify a user if the case remains open after a certain period of time has passed. With an escalation rule, you can:
      1. Choose to escalate a case to a queue or to another user.
      2. Configure the rule to automatically notify a user.
      3. Configure rule entries to define the order, criteria, and escalation actions.
   3. Entitlements help reps understand the level of service customers are entitled to based on their service level agreements (SLAs). Set up service contracts (SLAs) and create entitlements to detail the level of support each customer should be receiving.
   4. An entitlement process provides a timeline for support agents giving the steps that need to be completed to resolve a case.
   5. When creating an Entitlement process, there are certain steps within a timeline that are tracked to keep the process in check. These steps are called milestones. The first milestone to create is the first response milestone to indicate how quickly your support team should be responding to a case initially. The second milestone is the resolution time milestone which indicates how quickly a case should be resolved. Once these milestones are created, add them to your entitlement process so your support team can use the process when managing cases.
9. Contact Center Analytics: 5%
   1. Two types of service metrics
      1. Internal metrics focus on what happens inside the contact center, and external metrics focus on what happens outside the contact center. Some organizations focus on the internal, which means everything from measuring efficiency to overall employee satisfaction and turnover. Other organizations lean toward the external, which includes customer satisfaction and relationships.
   2. To monitor the productivity of your contact center, it’s important to measure the performance of individual agents as well as your entire service team. Using performance metrics, you can learn:
      1. What agents are doing with their time.
      2. How effective and efficient agents use their time.
      3. How much time the contact center staff as a whole needs to get their work done.
   3. Tracking customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) are great indicators of overall customer happiness and can tell you how they view the overall brand. NPS especially, because it measures the likelihood that your customers will recommend your brand to others—an important characteristic of a pleased customer, which can lead to positive word of mouth. Customers tend to believe other customers’ experiences with a company even more than the brand’s own marketing and advertising. Just look at reviews on Amazon or Yelp. Customers are very vocal about the products and services they receive from a company.
   4. Baseline Metrics and their meaning
      

      Metric	Meaning
      Average Handle Time (AHT)	The amount of time a team or a particular agent takes to solve customer cases.
      Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)	Usually measured by a post-touch survey, this measures the overall satisfaction of customers after dealing with customer service. This can be measured as a percentage or as a number (usually 1-10).
      First Contact Resolution (FCR)	Expressed as a percentage, this measures the proportion of cases that are solved on the first touch with customer service.
      First Response Time (FRT)	This is the average amount of time it takes for customer service to initially respond to customer inquiries.
      Total Cases	The sum total of cases that come through the contact center over a certain amount of time.

   5. Core metrics and outlines how those metrics can help customer to reach its service goals.
      

      Proposed Metric	How It Helps the Business
      Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)	This is a good benchmark for Ursa Major’s customer service: It’s the bottom-line metric. And although CSAT is a great measure of overall effectiveness, Ryan knows it’s affected by other kinds of activities in the contact center and at Ursa Major.
      Agent Satisfaction	Customers are important to Ursa Major, and so are their employees. Ryan wants to start a quarterly satisfaction survey for his contact center employees so he can assess their overall happiness and feelings toward the company.
      Total Cases vs. % Backlogged	Keeping track of case volume will help Ryan understand two things: his staff’s workload (total number of cases) and whether his customers are getting their issues solved (the percentage of cases that are backlogged).
      Net Promoter Score	Along with CSAT, Ryan wants to use NPS as the guiding metrics for his agents. He’ll evaluate them on these statistics rather than things like AHT or FCR so that they focus on the customer first and foremost. If agents show a high NPS, they’ll not only be pleasing customers but enhancing the brand image as well.
      Time to Resolution	This will be Ryan’s warning sign for many potential issues. If time to resolution goes up, he knows either his agents have too much work or their work is too complex. And if customers’ cases aren’t getting closed quickly enough, that can lead to a decrease in customer satisfaction.
      Agent Turnover	Ursa Major plans to grow, which means Ryan will be getting more agents. That’s a good thing! But Ryan wants to make sure that he’s hiring for growth, not backfilling a lot of spots that have been vacated. Agent turnover will help him keep this in mind.

10. Integration and Data Management: 5%
    1. Salesforce Call Center Terminology
       

       Softphone	An on-screen phone from which you can make and receive calls.
       Call Center	A Salesforce feature that integrates Salesforce with call systems built by developers or partners.
       Open CTI	A JavaScript API that lets developers or partners build cloud-based call systems for use with Salesforce’s Call Center.Since Open CTI is browser and platform agnostic, support agents can make calls on any browser and platform of their choice. Support agents can place a call with Microsoft® Internet Explorer®, Mozilla® Firefox®, Apple® Safari®, or Google Chrome™ on Mac, Linux, or Windows. They can use the technologies they like. Awesome!

    2. General Setup Process for Call Center
       1. Installs a CTI package created by a developer or partner from AppExchange—Salesforce’s online marketplace for apps.
       2. When installs the package, it creates a call center for your organization—an Open CTI system that integrates with Salesforce.
       3. Add users to the call center so that they can make and receive calls with a softphone in Salesforce.
    3. Large data volumes (LDV) can lead to sluggish performance, including slower queries, slower search and list views, and slower sandbox refreshing. You can avoid this predicament if you plan for accommodating LDV up front, designing your data model to build scalability in from the get-go.
    4. A key for managing large data volumes for peak performance is carefully architecting record ownership to avoid data skew. Data skew happens when more than 10,000 child records are associated with the same parent record within an org.
    5. Account Data Skew
       1. Too many child records associated with the same parent object in one of these relationships causes account data skew. Say you have a bunch of unassigned contacts and park them under one account named “Unassigned.” This can create issues with record locking and sharing performance.
    6. Record Locking
       1. You’re updating a large number of contacts under the same account in multiple threads. For each update, the system locks both the contact being changed and its parent account to maintain integrity in the database. Even though each lock is held for a very short time, because all the updates are trying to lock the same account, there’s a high risk an update will fail because a previous one is still holding the lock on the account.
    7. Ownership Skew
       1. When a large number of records with the same object type are owned by a single user, this imbalance causes ownership skew. Since every record is required to have an owner, it seems like the natural solution is to skew those records onto a generic owner, such the aforementioned “Unassigned.” But this can cause performance issues due to sharing calculations required to manage visibility of those records.
       2. When the skewed owner exists in the role hierarchy, operations like deletes or owner updates must remove sharing from the old owner and all parent users within the role hierarchy, and from all users given access by sharing rules. That’s why ownership changes tend to be one of the most costly transactional changes in the system.
    8. Lookup Skew
       1. Lookup skew happens when a very large number of records are associated with a single record in the lookup object (the object you’re searching against). Because you can place lookup fields on any object in Salesforce, lookup skew can create problems for any object within your organization.
    9. External objects are similar to custom objects, except they map to data that’s stored outside your Salesforce organization, enabling your users and the Force.com platform to search and interact with the external data.
    10. Breakdown of the types of relationships available to external objects:
        

        Relationship	Allowed Child Objects	Allowed Parent Objects	Parent Field for Matching Records
        Lookup	Standard Custom External	Standard Custom	The 18-character Salesforce record ID
        External Lookup	Standard Custom External	External	The External ID standard field
        Indirect Lookup	External	Standard Custom	You select a custom field with the External ID and unique attributes

    11. For data to be searched, it must first be indexed. Force.com automatically indexes most text fields so your users can build cross-object searches and quickly find records that contain strings of interest. Indexed searches are performed by first searching the indexes for appropriate records, then narrowing down the results based on access permissions, search limits, and other filters.
    12. It’s important to design selective list views, reports, and SOQL queries, and to understand query optimization.
    13. SOQL is Force.com’s database query language, similar to SQL. You can use SOQL to query child-to-parent relationships, which are often many-to-one, and to query parent-to-child relationships, which are almost always one-to-many.
    14. SOSL is Force.com’s full-text search language. SOSL can tokenize multiple terms within a field, and can build a search index off of this. If you’re searching for a specific distinct term that you know exists within a field, you might find SOSL faster than SOQL. However, for each Apex transaction, the governor limit for SOSL queries is 2,000; for SOQL queries it’s 50,000. So if you need to retrieve more than 2,000 records, SOQL is the better choice.
    15. When a bulk query is processed, Salesforce attempts to execute the query. If the query doesn’t execute within the standard two-minute timeout limit, the job fails and a QUERY_TIMEOUT error is returned. If this happens, rewrite a simpler query and resubmit the batch.
    16. A skinny table is a custom table in the Force.com platform that contains a subset of fields from a standard or custom base Salesforce object. Force.com can have multiple skinny tables if needed, and maintains them and keeps them completely transparent to you.
        1. Things to consider before implementing skinny tables:
           1. Skinny tables are skinny. To ensure optimal performance, they contain only the minimum set of fields required to fulfill specific business use cases. If you later decide to add a field to your report or SOQL query, you must contact Salesforce Customer Support to re-create the table.
           2. For Full sandboxes: Skinny tables are copied to your Full sandbox orgs. For other types of sandboxes: Skinny tables aren’t copied to your sandbox organizations. To have production skinny tables activated for sandbox types other than Full sandboxes, contact Salesforce Customer Support.
           3. Skinny tables are custom tables in the underlying Force.com database. They don’t have the dynamic metadata flexibility you find in the base object. If you alter a field type (for example, change a number field to a text field) the skinny table becomes invalid, and you must contact Salesforce Customer Support to create a new skinny table.
    17. Strategy before loading data into Salesforce
        1. Organization-wide sharing defaults. When you load data with a Private sharing model, the system calculates sharing as the records are being added. If you load with a Public Read/Write sharing model, you can defer this processing until after cutover.
        2. Complex object relationships. The more lookups you have defined on an object, the more checks the system has to perform during data loading. But if you’re able to establish some of these relationships in a later phase, that makes loading go faster.
        3. Sharing rules. If you have ownership-based sharing rules configured before loading data, each record you insert requires sharing calculations if the owner of the record belongs to a role or group that defines the data to be shared. If you have criteria-based sharing rules configured before loading data, each record with fields that match the rule selection criteria also requires sharing calculations.
        4. Workflow rules, validation rules, and triggers. These are powerful tools for making sure data entered during daily operations is clean and includes appropriate relationships between records. But they can also slow down processing if they’re enabled during massive data loads.
    18. During any data load and should not be messed with
        1. Parent records with master-detail children. You won’t be able to load child records if the parents don’t already exist.
        2. Record owners. In most cases, your records will be owned by individual users, and the owners need to exist in the system before you can load the data.
        3. Role hierarchy. You might think that loading would be faster if the owners of your records were not members of the role hierarchy. But in almost all cases, the performance would be the same, and it would be considerably faster if you were loading portal accounts. So there’s no benefit to deferring this aspect of configuration.
    19. SOAP API requires developers and administrators to implement complex processes to upload data in bite-sized chunks, monitor results, and retry failed records. This method is acceptable for small data loads, but becomes unwieldy and time-consuming with large data sets.
    20. Bulk API is designed to make it simple to process data from a few thousand to millions of records. Bulk API is based on REST principles and was developed specifically to simplify and optimize the process of loading or deleting large data sets.
        1. Using Bulk API for LDV allows for super-fast processing speeds, along with reduced client-side programmatic language, easy-to-monitor job status, automatic retry of failed records, support for parallel processing, minimal roundout trips to Force.com, minimal API calls, limited dropped connections, and easy-to-tune batch size. 
    21. PK stands for Primary Key—the object’s record ID—which is always indexed. PK chunking splits bulk queries on very large tables into chunks based on the record IDs of the queried records.
        1. Enable PK chunking when querying tables with more than 10 million records or when a bulk query consistently times out. PK Chunking is a supported feature of the Salesforce Bulk API, so it does all the work of splitting the queries into manageable chunks. Just enter a few parameters on your Bulk API job, and the platform automatically splits the query into separate chunks, executes a query for each chunk, and returns the data.
        2. You can use PK Chunking with most standard objects. It’s supported for Account, Campaign, CampaignMember, Case, Contact, Lead, LoginHistory, Opportunity, Task, and User, as well as all custom objects. To enable the feature, specify the header Sforce-Enable-PKChunking on the job request for your Bulk API query.
11. Service Console: 15%
    1. Support cases are customer feedback or issues that need to be addressed. Your Case Feed is a news-feed–like display that shows you and your team everything that’s happening with a support case. CaseFeed help you to track
       1. Voicemails left for customers
       2. Email updates with new info from customers
       3. Notes about who has talked with the customer and what they’ve been told
       4. Knowledge-base articles that explain how to solve the customer’s problem
       5. Next steps
    2. The service console is where all the Salesforce service features come together. It’s a single screen that gives your team a 360-degree view of each customer and where that customer is in your support process. Think of it as a camera lens that zooms in and out on your customers. When someone views cases in a console, they can quickly zoom in all the little details related to the customer—account, contact, products, and more—or they can focus on the one big detail: the customer’s question or feedback.
    3. Within the console, case details, contact details, and related cases are displayed, so you can be sure you’re looking at the right case and have the appropriate information at hand when you need it.
    4. Help Center frees up your agents from handling common questions or requests by enabling customers to find their own answers to frequently asked questions. Ready-to-use templates are easy to customize to create a branded self-service site. That way, customers can connect to your team of experts for more complex issues. 
    5.  The Lightning App Builder is a point-and-click tool that makes it easy to customize your service console and give your whole team the information it needs, all in one place. 
    6. Macro builders let your team set up common responses so they don’t have to reinvent the service wheel every time a customer has a problem.
    7. With Service Cloud Essentials, you can connect our web chat feature with your email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube accounts all on a single screen (the service console) to help you drive free publicity, understand your customers better, and manage everything in one view.
    8. The utility bar is your friend. This customizable bar runs along the bottom of the console and provides a shortcut to all the tools your team needs to provide a smarter, quicker resolution for every customer issue. It’s like a Swiss Army knife for customer service, minus all the sharp edges!

Additional Resources

A few blogs help you prepare for the Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant exam.

1. Sign up for Salesforce Certification Days Webinar for – Service Cloud Consultant Certification
2. YouTube Videos
   1. How to Set Up Salesforce Knowledge in Service Cloud
   2. How to Plan Your Lightning Knowledge Transition in Service Cloud
   3. Close Cases Faster with Omni-Channel Skills-Based Routing
3. Instructor Led training by Trailhead Academy
   1. Administer and Maintain Service Cloud (ADX261)
   2. Prepare for your Service Cloud Consultant Certification Exam (CRT261)
4. Blog Posts by Salesforce Ohana
   1. Service Cloud Consultant Certification Guide & Tips – ^{SalesforceBen}

Conclusion

If you have basic experience with all the above topics, passing the exam will be a cinch, and you will be able to earn the much-coveted Salesforce Certified Service Cloud Consultant certification exam! However, if you do not have enough experience (1-2 years) with the Service Cloud implementation and plan to become a Certified Service Cloud Consultant. I suggest you draw a 12-16 weeks plan (finish the above Trailhead to prepare for it).

I hope that you find these tips and resources useful. If you put the time and effort in, you will succeed. Happy studying and good luck!

Formative Assessment:

I want to hear from you!

Have you taken the Salesforce Certified Service Cloud consultant exam? Are you preparing for the exam now? Share your tips in the comments!