Business Analysis Skills for Salesforce Service Cloud

Understand business analysis techniques, skills and the questions you should ask when deploying Sales Cloud with our latest blog from Supermums CEO & Founder, Heather Black. 

Join Heather as she shares top tips on Business Analysis techniques more generically and then focussing in on a specific cloud. Sign up to our Weekly Career Boost Bulletin to be notified of each release. 

Over the next 4 weeks, Heather will be sharing top tips on:

• Part 1 – We are giving an introduction to Business Analysis and Sales Cloud
• Part 2 – We are looking at the Business Analysis process and Service Cloud 
• Part 3 – We are looking at how to build a demo and Non Profit Cloud
• Part 4 – We are looking at Business Analysis documentation and E-Marketing 

At Supermums we deliver the Consultancy Skills Course to upskill individuals on Business Analysis, Change Management and Agile Project Management so these skills can be blended and delivered holistically. These skills really are inter-dependent and essential to each other to deliver a project successfully.

Heather Black is the lead trainer on this course and she has overseen over 700 Salesforce projects whilst running a Salesforce Consultancy for 9 years. During this time she developed a suite of templates and tools to standardise the questions asked on projects to maximise the chance of success of a project and avoid the risk of a question not being asked. Find out more about the Course here. 

How to Prepare the Client for Business Analysis 

Depending on whether you are working internally or externally as a Salesforce professionally some of these questions you may want to ask in advance of starting any project to better estimate time, budget and effort involved. Getting the client prepared for business analysis is one of the game changers as it influences the amount of time they invest in planning and designing to build the right solution. 

• Meet with the key sponsors and executive team to understand and prioritise the key business drivers for this implementation and to decide on the approach you are collectively going to take with stakeholders. Understanding the business priorities will help to prioritise functional and technical requirements. A change management and communication plan is also essential, and your approach to business analysis will be governed by the organisational culture and preferred communication style of the executive team. 
• Advise and work with the Executive Sponsor on how and when to implement a suitable communication strategy to inform the stakeholders about the why, what and how of the Salesforce project to generate buy-in. 
• Explain the business analysis and agile project management process in advance of a discovery workshop to anyone who is participating – showcase a demo of the product features, explain what questions are you going to be asking and explain how requirements will get prioritised.- record this session so people can watch on replay as needed.
• Agree a suitable timeline by which the participants can prepare all of the necessary information you will need before the Discovery Workshop to maximise the value of the workshop. There is no point running a workshop if they turn up unprepared without answers to your questions . This is often one of the biggest risks to project delays and budget impacts. 
• Circulate a Business Analysis Questionnaire to participants in advance to the Discovery Workshop with a deadline for participants to complete so you can review before conducting the workshop and to make sure the relevant information has been prepared. Access the Business Analysis Questionnaire for Service Cloud on our Consultancy Skills Course.
• During the Discovery Workshop be able to present different technical scenarios to help improve processes to help the participants make informed decisions. 

What Questions do you want to ask about Service Cloud ?

The Service Cloud Discovery process could include a whole range of aspects including the following high level requirements:

for Service Cloud and Non-Functional requirements with a presentation deck and a training session on how to deliver it alongside the technical considerations. If you are worried about what questions to ask then check out our course here. 

Here are 5 of favourite questions you don’t want to miss but there are loads more functional and non-functional requirement questions that you want to include in your questionnaire. 

• What are their different products, services and customers, are their multiple customer support teams and where are their teams and customers located globally? This will influence how many different project life cycles you will need to deliver e.g. multiple discovery workshops through to training sessions and also whether global influences are relevant such as languages and currency considerations.
• What are the pain points and key benefits they want to derive from Salesforce as a Service Support Team from different points of view – as an organisation, a team and individually? 
• How would the company measure the ROI of the Salesforce investment and how can this be measured? What are the baseline stats now and what do they want it to be in the future. It can be useful to have some example indicators here to share in case they aren’t sure.. For example, reduction in cases created, reduction in case closure time, improve satisfaction score.
• How is Support Service Performance measured? What are their key reports and dashboard requirements as they will influence how you build the system. Again it can be useful to have some example indicators here to share in case they aren’t sure. e.g. no of cases closed/open, length of time cases open, customer feedback score etc. 
• What is their Customer Engagement and Support Process? Within this there will be multiple functional questions and technical considerations to ask, especially to discover whether the Service Cloud functionality needs extending to include Experience Cloud, native products or integration of omni-channel solutions, self-service portal, knowledge management etc.. This will inevitable increase time and budget for any project. 

Assess their current usage of Service Cloud

If the customer is currently using Salesforce then you want to assess the current usage of the Service Cloud product – with this you are reviewing the product features being used, assessing user adoption, and level of data input and integrity . You can discover this through your BA process by asking the questions in our FREE Health Check Questionnaire and Template and to aid this you can also plug in these two FREE apps and get instant insight into how they are using the product. 

Download Supermums free Health Check Questionnaire Template.

Download Improved Apps free User Adoption Tool to discover who are your high adopters and low adopters.

Be Knowledgeable in the Product and Third Party Apps

• Complete your Service Cloud Training and Certification in Advance
• Build a Demo so you are proficient in knowing how the product works 
• Understand the Third Party Apps that can add value to the Service Cloud. Here are some great ISV apps you should know about. 

Create custom docs, forms, apps, e-signatures, and surveys with Titan’s full-suite of enterprise applications designed to integrate seamlessly with Salesforce data across your entire organization to extend your Service Cloud Solution.

Harness the power of video in your Service Cloud Solution to record events. Just tap “Record” during the service call, capture a quick video and then tag it *internal* or *client-ready* or any tag. Then let speech-to-text create automated notes, get unprecedented visibility on your field operations, and delight your customers with video-powered Service Reports.

SharinPix makes it possible to create and configure your own optimized use of images in all your business processes, without code! Add SharinPix into your Service Cloud solution to easily add, attach and save images taken by customers or field agents.