Just like the other comparisons we have made between Salesforce and SAP, this comparison will also give you a fair and clear overview of the two. Only this time, we dive deeper into the Service Cloud. Both Salesforce and SAP offer many features within their Service Cloud which easily and understandably give you the feeling of not knowing where to look.
In this overview, we will discuss and compare the main features and capabilities of both the Salesforce and SAP Service Cloud. Let us guide you towards a self-made decision of which Service Cloud is best.
Let’s start with a clear overview.
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| With the Salesforce Service Cloud, you can decide how you want your customers to reach you. This could be by phone, email, chat, text, online communities, social media, and many more. The Salesforce Service Cloud provides the tools necessary for you to respond efficiently to customer requests and questions so that customer satisfaction is guaranteed when your customer contact you. Additionally, the Salesforce Service Cloud increases the productivity of your Service team, allows communication on multiple channels, and helps you with solving problems in the field.
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| The SAP Service Cloud is one of the solutions to the SAP C/4HANA solution suite. The SAP service cloud can help you with the entire customer service process. Moreover, the SAP Service Cloud helps you to fulfil after-sales services. The SAP Service Cloud aims to maximize the Customer Experience (CX) and create customers for life. The SAP Service Cloud helps you deliver and exceed the service that your customers expect while simultaneously it helps you to increase productivity. Above all, SAP has integrated all the tools into one interface which enables easy and quick access to the necessary data for solving problems or creating new orders.
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AI & Machine Learning
Salesforce
Salesforce has integrated Salesforce Einstein into its Service Cloud. This enables companies of any size to deploy a connected customer experience which is predictive, automated, and intelligent.
The Service Cloud Einstein enables companies of all sizes to:
- Find solutions for customer requests or questions faster: Based on service history and trends, it provides service recommendations automatically.
- Deliver the right answers at the right time: With the use of service query context and history, the Salesforce Service Cloud can provide recommended answers to service questions automatically. Service Cloud Einstein also helps direct the right employee, to the right query, at the right time.
- Getting smarter over time: Because of Machine Learning, Service Cloud Einstein gets smarter over time which helps companies continue to improve their service.
SAP
With the use of Machine Learning, the SAP Service Cloud provides you with intelligent ticket functionalities that enable you to automatically categorize incoming service tickets based on historical data. By implementing Machine Learning, the SAP Service Cloud is able to:
- Improve service response times.
- Improve the efficiency of service teams.
- Deliver accurate and best possible service
All these done by:
- Increasing agents productivity
- Better prioritization of incoming tickets
- Automatic classification based on model accuracy
Although both Salesforce and SAP use AI and Machine learning for various tasks within their Service cloud, it is Salesforce’s Service Cloud Einstein that is just more experienced. Therefore, Salesforce is favoured over SAP when it comes to AI and machine learning.
Social Customer Service
Salesforce
The combination of the Salesforce Service Cloud and Salesforce Social Studio allows you to listen and respond to your customers on multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The Salesforce Service Cloud redirects service requests created on social media to the right Service team member. Moreover, the 360-degree view of your customers empowers your Service team with social media engagement, in real-time, on the platform of your customer’s choice.
SAP
The SAP Service cloud enables you to engage with your customers via such Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels to help them answer their service questions quickly. In addition, the SAP Service Cloud allows you to automatically create a service ticket based on a received posting or message, and the customer that created the service ticket is entered into the system. Moreover, all of the historical service data is available for future ticket processing usage, helping your sales agents to support your customer faster and easier.
With the support of the SAP Service Cloud, data can be analyzed and processed instantly. As a result, the requests, suggestions, etc., can be forwarded automatically to the desired teams.
Some of the advantages of social media integration into the SAP Service Cloud are:
- Automated ticket creation after receiving a message or a tweet
- Automatic entry of ticket creator including detailed information
- Immediate response via SAP Service Cloud
- Automatic forwarding of service tickets to the desired team
Both Salesforce and SAP offer extensive options for providing service and engaging with your customer on social media platforms. Therefore, neither Salesforce nor SAP has an advantage over the other.
Field Service Management
Salesforce
Salesforce provides its users with a powerful, customizable, and mobile-friendly field service tool called Field Service Lightning. Field Service Lightning provides your field service technicians with the tools needed to manage work orders and scheduling. Some of the Capabilities of Field Service Lighting are:
- Create records that represent your field service technicians, dispatchers, and agents, and add details about their skills, location, and availability
- Set up multilevel service territories that represent the regions where your technicians can work
- Track the location and status of your inventory, warehouses, service vehicles, and customer sites
- Schedule one-time or recurring work orders for customers, and add details about technician preference and required skills and parts
- Create maintenance plans and templates to standardize your field service tasks
- Generate service reports to keep customers informed about service progress
Field Service Lighting has a mobile application that supports many tools on-and offline. For more information about Field Service Lightning, click here.
SAP
The SAP Service Cloud includes a field service management tool that provides your customers and field service technicians with all the right instruments. With the field service management tool, your field service technicians can quickly fix any issues and are able to provide your customers with the information they need. Additionally, the implementation of smart technologies enables your service technicians to find problems more easily. Because of the On- and Offline availability of the Field service management tool, your technicians are able to continue their work without the constant need for an internet connection.
Features included in the Field service management tool are:
- Analytics and Reports: Which includes Real-time field service metrics, and individualized mobile and desktop reporting and invoicing.
- Scheduling and Dispatching: Which includes AI-enabled scheduling, Transparent scheduling, and Skill management.
- Intelligent Self-services: Which includes Intuitive customer experience, simplified self-service, and connection to the self-service portal.
- Work order management: Which includes Work order lifecycle management, Inventory visibility, and SLAs and reserved materials.
- Knowledge management: Which includes Dynamic smart forms and information sharing.
Want to know more about The SAP Field service tool, click here.
Both Salesforce and SAP offer a field service tool that is available in on- and offline mode and that is beneficial for your field service technicians and customers. Therefore, neither Salesforce nor SAP has an advantage over the other.
Self-Service Customer portal
Salesforce
With the Lightning Community Builder of Salesforce, you are able to build branded, mobile-responsive portals and communities easily and quickly. It allows you to integrate Salesforce with your business processes which enables your customer to connect to what they need effortless. Actions such as checking an account, paying a bill, or booking an appointment are made easy. Moreover, the processes started by your customer in the portal are easily transferred to Service agents. This benefits your customers a lot since they no longer have to repeat themselves anymore.
SAP
The SAP Service cloud provides your customers with greater choice and the ability to take control of their service issues in the self-service customer portal. It allows your customers to create, edit, and view their service requests at any time on every device. Moreover, using the self-service portal has become extremely easy because of the ability to simply scan a QR code with a mobile phone. By simply scanning the QR-code, your customer gets access to the self-service portal and the different options such as requesting maintenance and the ability to engage with a conversational AI-chatbot.
Back-office Integration
The integration of ERP systems and a Service Cloud is possible and has lots of benefits and that can boost productivity and streamline business processes even more. Moreover, the integration of SAP systems with Salesforce systems has become quite common because they both are market leaders in the fields of ERP and CRM.
Let’s see what the benefits and downsides are for both the Service Clouds when looking at integration with your ERP system.
Salesforce
The Salesforce Service Cloud has native integration with the two largest ERP systems; Oracle and SAP.
Since Salesforce is the current market leader for CRM applications, it is not so weird that some ERP systems are specially built around Salesforce. An example of an ERP system build around Salesforce is Rootstock.
Besides that, it’s easy to develop custom integrations for the Service Cloud with Salesforce’s Application Programming Interface (API). The integration of the Salesforce Service Cloud with your current ERP system can be costly.
SAP
ERP integration gives you easy access to real-time back-office information. It provides you with the insights needed to make the best possible customer service decisions.
The SAP Service Cloud has Predefined Integration capabilities to SAP ERP. Using the SAP Service Cloud and SAP ERP reduces licensing costs. Furthermore, with the integration between the SAP Service Cloud and SAP ERP, you will no longer use middleware so TCO can be reduced. SAP Service Cloud Integration is smoother in an environment where you have an SAP back-end, especially when this is an SAP S/4 HANA environment. It is also possible to integrate the SAP Service Cloud with other ERP systems too.
SAP ERP has been and still is the most commonly used ERP system on the market and because of the smoother integration and reduction in cost, The SAP Service Cloud is favoured over Salesforce.
Contract Terms and Pricing
It is always good to know the contract details before you go into a long-term commitment with a company or software. Nevertheless, the unpleasant surprises can have devastating effects when investing in something costly and important such as a Service Cloud.
Now, we look into pricing models, contract terms, and more of both Salesforce and SAP.
Salesforce
- Per-user subscription-based pricing model.
- Long-term contracts.
- Higher chance of an increasing subscription price on renewal.
- Can terminate a contract ( and delete your data ) with only a few days’ notices.
- Seat-account cannot be changed during a term
Want to see more Salesforce contact details? Click here.
The costs for the Salesforce Service Cloud differ per company. There are multiple pricing factors such as the number of users per month and add-ons that can make a difference. The Salesforce Service Cloud has 4 different editions: Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited.
SAP
- Per-user subscription-based pricing model
- Long-term contracts.
- Lower costs and TCO. When you also have an SAP ERP system
- More flexible when having a variation in the number of users.
The costs of the SAP Service Cloud also differs per company. Similar to the Salesforce Service Cloud, multiple pricing factors such as the number of users per month and add-ons that can make a difference.
However, The SAP Service Cloud only has three different editions: Standard Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition.
Price of the SAP Service Cloud license fee per user per month
| Product | Costs |
| Standard edition | 75 US$ |
| Professional edition | 125 US$ |
| Enterprise edition | 170 US$ |
Conclusion
So, who has the better Service Cloud? Salesforce or SAP?
As you might have read in this article, it is not that simple to decide. Both Salesforce’s and SAP’s Sales Cloud holds many features to support your service teams in their day-to-day activities. Both the Service Clouds enable you to provide the service that your customers expect.
Salesforce has better AI and Machine Learning capabilities. However, SAP comes out on top when it comes to offline capabilities, contract terms, and back-office integration.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, it is up to you to decide which one you think is better. We hope in this article gave you the information needed to make this decision.
If you need more information about the Service Clouds of SAP or Salesforce, please feel free to contact us. We also have many other articles available on our website about other CRM and ERP solutions.
