The solution should improve:

1. Reports & dashboard - The product should be capable of delivering complex reports as per company requirements without the need for a Tableau license.

2. Einstein has limited capabilities, and it suggests the analysis by predefined algorithms - but in a practical scenario, businesses need to ask real-time questions, and AI products should be capable of delivering the exact answers. Generic answers may not be effective. 

There are a few areas of improvement. 

1. One area for improvement could be in the speed and accuracy of analytics, particularly around resolving cases. There's room to enhance SLA (Service Level Agreement) management as well. 
2. Secondly, the Knowledge Management platform could use some intelligence improvements. Data mining techniques for recommending the most relevant knowledge articles would be beneficial. Currently, that selection process is more administrative. AI could be used here.
3.  Finally, within Field Service, it would be great to see better asset and inventory management capabilities built directly into the application.

Salesforce should include maps as a default offering so that, as a customer, I can view where the technician is on the geographical map. Right now, it comes with an additional cost. Salesforce does not have a global tie-up with maps.

Moreover, reports need to be improved. Their sources have very standard and basic reports, sometimes not solving the business operations issues. And we have to move toward an analytical tool or some other tool. Reports are the weakest area of Salesforce.

Occasionally, individuals face difficulty accessing information that seems to be unavailable to them. The main concern for me revolves around the speed of certain integrations. Occasionally, there's a delay of a few minutes for data to synchronize.

I'm not deeply engaged with this team, so I don't have extensive experience with it. I haven't used it much yet, so my experience is limited.

The documentation could be improved. Salesforce must provide a place to store certain categories of documentation.

The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

There are some imperfections in the product's stability, and it is an area where improvements are required.

One minor drawback is that its implementation requires some preparation. It's not something you can implement instantly; it takes time.

The only issue I've encountered is that you need to ensure the implementation is done properly, which can be time-consuming. So, it requires some time and attention.

The pricing of the solution can be less expensive. 

The pricing for what Salesforce Service Cloud offers is not great.

There is room for improvement in pricing.

Salesforce Service Cloud's report functionality could be improved.

The workforce management could use improvement as my client wasn't happy with the scheduling engine. The workforce management, particularly a third-party vendor, we didn't have much success with. They had never done an integration with Salesforce and we we're working specifically with another third party just to implement their field services organization.

The treatment of email processing in the Service Cloud is still reminiscent of email processes appropriate to sales. There is a lack of flexibility to process an email (not web-to-case contacts) as a contact. This might take an entire rewrite of the approach or a purchase and integration of one of the competing email processing apps (which will go un-named, but you know who I mean).

Having said that, Salesforce is always improving, I am constantly amazed at the way they listen to their customers and (eventually) move innovations suggested by the field into their products.

I'd like to see a better UI/UX. It also needs more competitive pricing on the Service Cloud feature licenses.

My clients have raised concerns with the knowledge search algorithm. Sometimes it seems the most relevant knowledge articles are not the ones that are returned in the search results. Salesforce has made substantial strides to improve on this over the past few releases.

Salesforce is rolling out a new user interface called “Lightning Experience” which is not yet available for Service Cloud. I would like to see it fully rolled out to Service Cloud, which they do plan to do.

The integrations with other solutions can be improved. 

While there is extensive reporting in the system, there is not always a direct route to get what you are looking for. There are plenty of tools in the market that provide those capabilities. I would just prefer it if there were an SFDC option.

• Why is merging Cases not something that comes out-of-the-box? We had to purchase Case Merge Premium to merge our Cases.
• The Macro creation isn’t very user friendly. It would be beneficial to organize the macros into folders also. I think the average support rep without Salesforce knowledge would have issues creating macros.
• When sending a reply email to a client directly from the Detail View of a Case, it will insert your signature at the very bottom of the thread (which no one sees). You have to use the Case Feed to insert your signature below your reply.
• Sending an email from the Case Feed has a character limit (which can be extended, but it is limited). If you have a very long email correspondence with a client, you may need to shorten it in order to send.
• There is no field on the Case to show who the last email correspondence was from. I had to create my own field for this.
• When opening a Case tab in the Service Console and a customer replies to the Case while open, you have to completely refresh the tab to see the recent email to reply to (not automatic). Sometimes a rep may not notice this, go to send an email, and get an error that they need to refresh.

I would like to see them focus on improving existing functionality instead of trying to market new functionality that is not enterprise ready. While I appreciate their push towards staying on the bleeding edge, it is a shared platform. Thus it is essential that new functionality is able to function with large amounts of data, which Lightning currently is not.

They could improve upon analytics. The reporting function is extremely user-friendly and powerful. I can get the reports that I need 99% of the time, but it is not a robust BI tool.

Already, Salesforce is on the correct path by moving things towards Android, and iPhones. It also needs a faster and smoother UI.

The prices for storing files - like example attachments - are really high per GB. We have an alternative to-do task which has one purpose, to find an alternative file storage service that we can later on connect with Salesforce. 

Nowadays, we are lucky because the customers would like to connect on-premise Sharepoint with Salesforce and there is a solution that we can easily apply to them.

Salesforce is always ahead of the curve with new functionalities rolling out every quarter. It does get a little tricky playing around with certain features in Salesforce and you have to get used to it.

Specifically, they need to improve the Knowledge Management module. Right now, managing articles is a pain for administrators especially if an admin needs to maintain thousands of Knowledge Articles in a Salesforce organization. Also, the new revamped UI of Service Cloud that has been introduced as part of Winter '15 release is quite confusing. I hope to see the issues fixed in Spring '16 release.

They need to improve the email integration with Outlook. At the moment the plugin is very unstable, and crashes from time to time. The only other option is to include a Salesforce email address into BCC, which isn't convenient.

Also, I’ve not checked for a while, but for a long time Salesforce didn’t have a very good mobile app, at least not for Android. If they could build a proper one with the same functions as the desktop version, that would be really cool!

The pricing of the various editions could be improved.

It would be nice if there were several components to download from the app-exchange, like building blocks that we would just plug into the console. As previously stated, the out-of-the-box console looks nice and has some powerful standard functionality, but is nothing like you see in demos. It would be great If there was a package containing some custom console components to put in the sidebars or to tweak it more easily.

To give a simple example: the standard related lists components that you put in the sidebar contain a first column called action with an edit/delete link. In a sidebar, this takes up a lot of valuable space and for me. Those links were not necessary in the sidebar, so I would have liked to be able to disable those or something (but not by taking the edit/delete rights away of the user profile). So we had to build some Visualforce custom component to replicate the exact same functionality but without that first column.

It seems something small, but one of the great powers of the Service Cloud console is to have a lot of information in one screen, so screen space is valuable.

There's an issue where creating a repetitive appointment creates two appointments on the first occurrence.

Reporting needs improvement as sometimes we need to export data and work with it in Excel.

• Salesforce Community
• Salesforce Sales Cloud
• Content
• Library

There is no control over the appearance of Visual Flow pages, giving the appearance of an amateur web application within the Salesforce interface.

It would also be good if there were a workforce management component to balance call distribution in a contact centre based on agent skills and experience.

• I would like better tracking of cases with SLA overdue (including "soon overdue").
• Emailing from the product has its limitations.
• In the web view, the editing window is too narrow, and it's difficult for complex cases with many details (logs, etc.), so I would like to adjust the middle column size. See below:

• No ability to paste pictures from clipboard.
• Adding in-line comments is not easy.
• I would like them to add a button such as "Send email and mark case as pending customer info".
• No embedded management of out of office auto-replies.

I'd like to see more of a blog feature to allow better updates from our staff and link to it socially. This would save us having to run these through two different systems.

In the marketing part, I want to see a more powerful campaign function with BI integration.

UI/UX has always proven difficult to keep up with. Salesforce, in general, requires a continued training effort to keep people up to speed and to encourage adoption in the tools. While there have been big improvements to date, simple things like ability to bookmark, right-click or otherwise multi-task panes and articles in Salesforce and the community have been missing.

Avoid customizations as much as possible.