Efficient Salesforce support services available round-the-clock are an inherent part of solving your CRM challenges and ensuring its successful use. In the article, we review the support services from Salesforce.com, mention when their support won’t help, and provide a list of reliable Salesforce support vendors.
Salesforce.com support plans
Salesforce provides its support services within 3 plans: Standard, Premier, and Premier+.
The Standard plan, which is free of charge, implies using self-learning resources, like Trailhead and Trailblazer community. However, these options are not enough, when, for instance, there’s a need to make a data export from Salesforce or manage performance issues. Such cases make the majority of Salesforce customers purchase more advanced support plans.
Some of the typical Salesforce issues can be solved within Premier and Premier+ plans that cost 20% and 30% of net user license fees accordingly. Within these plans, user cases submitted by phone and online are handled according to their severity level:
| Severity level | Issues addressed |
| Level 1 – Critical (response time to the cases – 1 hour. Responses are provided 24×7, including weekends and holidays). | Critical production issues affecting all users, including system unavailability and data integrity issues with no workaround available. |
| Level 2 – Urgent (response time to the cases – 2 hours. Responses are provided 24×7, including weekends and holidays). | Major functionality is impacted or performance is significantly degraded. Issues are persistent and affect many users. No reasonable workaround is available. The scope of support also includes time-sensitive requests such as requests for feature activation or data export. |
| Level 3 – High (response time – 4 local business hours, excluding weekends and holidays). | System performance issues or bugs affecting a few users. A short-term workaround is available. |
| Level 4 – Medium (response time – 8 local business hours, excluding weekends and holidays). Level 4 also includes Configuration Services available within Premier+ plan. |
Inquiries regarding a routine technical issue; information requested on application capabilities, navigation, installation or configuration (within Premier+ plan only); bugs affecting a few users. A reasonable workaround is available.
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What Salesforce.com support doesn’t do
Salesforce.com support plans have certain limitations, which don’t allow addressing the support needs of Salesforce users in full. The list of these limitations includes:
- Code-based Salesforce customizations
- Ongoing administration of the Salesforce solution
- Data import and management activities
- Instructor-led user training on default and custom-built functionality
3 reliable Salesforce support service providers
If your Salesforce support needs lie beyond the scope of the Salesforce.com support service, you can turn to the following vendors:
ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is a Salesforce consulting partner with 11 years of experience in CRM development and support. The company efficiently addresses the Salesforce support needs of the enterprises from retail, professional services, IT, manufacturing, healthcare, banking, and other industries. ScienceSoft’s Salesforce support offering includes the following services for the key Salesforce products (Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, etc.):
Administration support:
- Daily administration
- Data administration
- 24/7 system monitoring
- Monthly health checks
- User help desk
Development support:
- Troubleshooting
- System evolution
Accenture
A multinational IT consulting and service company, Accenture has been providing full-scale Salesforce services since 2004. Accenture is also certified by Salesforce in all Salesforce Clouds and works with companies from multiple industries. Salesforce support service offering by Accenture includes:
Salesforce support:
- Troubleshooting
- Performance monitoring
- System administration
Managed services
User training
VRP Consulting
A Salesforce partner since 2019, VRP Consulting provides the following Salesforce support services:
- Business process configuration and customization
- System health check and monitoring
- Ongoing administration
- Salesforce performance optimization
Make this info work for you
To solve your Salesforce support issues most efficiently, think of the possible distribution of support responsibilities between different vendors. For instance, you can leverage free Salesforce options to provide user training on default functionality or get advice from the Salesforce community. And a third-party support provider can become responsible for development and administration support activities.