Certified: Service Cloud Consultant

Last week I did something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I sat for the Service Cloud Consultant exam. I was inspired by others in the community who recently earned this certification and thought, what the hell, let’s do it! What better time than now? Like others have recently noted, this was a pretty straight forward exam if you know the material. I didn’t use any study resources for this, but I will outline all the Service Cloud experiences that helped me pass this exam. You can study all you want and complete a hundred Trailhead modules, but the best way to learn, in my opinion, will always be by doing. You can learn a lot of theory by reading a book, but I feel like its always just a little bit different in the real world with real requirements and especially the weird requirements.

Industry Knowledge

These questions make up 10% of the test and are focused on things you’d truly do if you were running a contact center. Things like what are the best KPI’s to be tracking for various things, solving business challenges, which products to use for which requirements, etc. I think probably more than anything, this is the section that is most helpful if you’ve actually done it before. I was the admin and architect of a Service Cloud implementation for 5 years. I had weekly meetings with our service leaders and executives. I picked up a lot during that time with them.

Implementation Strategies

These questions make up 15% of the test and are focused on project management and licensing models. You could definitely study for this section and wouldn’t need a lot of industry experience here, though of course its always beneficial. Experience running any project would be helpful, doesn’t even have to be Service Cloud or Salesforce specific. A project is mostly a project, so experience is experience and there will be a lot of cross over from other jobs you might have had. Besides project experience, deployment experience is useful to have here. Have you used VS Code? Have you migrated changes with change sets? That knowledge and experience will come in handy for these questions (and similar questions on all the various consultant exams).

Service Cloud Solution Design

This section makes up 16% of the test and I’d recommend some actual Service Cloud experience here. My case management experience was very useful here – things like building out console apps, using the App Builder in general, and implementing CTI/softphones. My experience with implementing a self service site using Communities/Engagement Cloud was also extremely helpful here. There were quite a few questions about Field Service, which I actually don’t have hands-on experience with, but I can say that what I’ve learned via Trailhead was enough to answer those questions.

Knowledge Management

This section is only 9% of the test, but I felt like every question on the exam was about Knowledge 🤣. If I hadn’t have implemented Knowledge myself, I think I would have really struggled with these. And in fact, I probably stared at these questions longer than any other section. One thing that I haven’t done in terms of implementing Knowledge, is migrating Knowledge from Classic to Lightning – and I felt like there were a lot questions about this. I recommend studying up on all the considerations and limitations of this process, for sure. My experience setting up data categories, approval processes, and then just like analytics around tracking the success of a Knowledge Base were important.

Interaction Channels

This section makes up 10% of the test and I felt was mostly about the best way to submit a case. Email to Case knowledge will be extremely helpful here! I’ve setup a lot of email to case in my time, but I’ve never done email to case on demand. Luckily I knew the differences from various Trailheads or other learning I’ve done in the past. I was kind of expecting there to be a lot more around Chat or Einstein Bots in this section, or maybe I’m just still geeking out about my latest implementation, but there wasn’t much there. It would be good to understand the basics of chat and how agents interact with the platform though.

Case Management

This section makes up 15% and I feel like represents the meat of Service Cloud from a management perspective. My experience with entitlements and milestones was very beneficial here, along with automation tools like Flow, quick actions, macros, and even recommendations. Another thing that I haven’t had hands on experience with is Social Customer Service, but I thought the questions were super straight forward and could logic out the correct answer.

Contact Center Analytics

This is only 5% of the test, but speaking from experience, this is a huge part of maintaining a Service Cloud implementation. Its all about the data right?! Understanding various standard report types that get used with Service as well as industry best practice metrics was very helpful here. I don’t know if I’ve really seen too many resources actually on Service metrics and KPI’s. If you don’t have the industry experience, I would recommend googling this and seeing what folks report on and why.

Integration and Data Management

This makes up only 5% of the test as well, but is another big one. What is your data without data management and data quality guidelines? This is another section where I thought my industry experience came in handy. If I didn’t work hands-on with an org, I might think that case data is always clean, always filled in perfectly every time, and so simple to migrate. Of course that is not the case, ever, no matter how hard we try! I might spend some time exploring App Exchange and the various tools offered there.

Service Console

This makes up another 15% and is where your service agents will interact with all the cool things you build. I designed, redesigned, and redesigned service consoles for 5 years. It is a never ended cycle as requirements change, processes are updated, and new technologies are introduced. It would be good practice to just play around with the page designer and get a feel for how all the different components and pieces of Service Cloud work together. If you don’t have the industry experience yet, jump into a playground and just start building out some different requirements that you think would be helpful in a service organization.

Final Thoughts

You can get pretty far on all of these sections using Trailhead or other resources, but there is no better training that on the job training and getting hands on with a product or features. I wish you the best of luck on your journey to certified Service Cloud Consultant!